Guatemala Non-Consensual Exposure Audit Record

PROBLEM: In 1946–1948 the U.S. Public Health Service deliberately exposed ~1,308 Guatemalans — prisoners, soldiers, psychiatric patients and commercial sex workers — to syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid without consent, to test whether penicillin could prevent infection after exposure. The experiments were never published; the records sat in Dr John Cutler's archived papers until historian Susan Reverby found them in 2003–2005. The Presidential Commission (Sept 2011), reviewing ~125,000 documents, found at least 83 deaths among participants and called the experiments "unconscionable basic violations of ethics".

SOLUTION: An IBM Cloud Ideas compliance improvement that maintains a non-consensual exposure audit record for government-funded research abroad: every deliberate exposure of a human subject, the consent record (or its absence), the treatment given, and the publication status, logged in one auditable register — so an unpublished, unconsented experiment cannot sit in an archive for sixty years before anyone reviews it.

EVIDENCE BASIS: DOCUMENTED — USPHS experiments 1946–1948, ~1,308 people deliberately exposed; ~5,500 subjected to diagnostic testing; under 700 of those exposed received some documented treatment; at least 83 deaths among participants (Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, "'Ethically Impossible'", Sept 2011); Obama apology Oct 2010; Reverby discovery 2003–2005.