The United States formally apologised last Friday for research carried out between 1946 and 1948 in which people in Guatemala were deliberately infected with sexually transmitted diseases.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius called the research "reprehensible". Their joint statement added: "We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologise to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices. The conduct exhibited during the study does not represent the values of the US, or our commitment to human dignity and great respect for the people of Guatemala."
Guatemalan officials "took into account" that the experiments happened more than 60 years ago. A spokesman for the Guatemalan president said: "Of course we reject such actions. We know this happened a long time ago, but it is unacceptable, and we accept Secretary Clinton's apology."
The study was discovered by a researcher at Wellesley College, who found it archived but unpublished.
Its aim was to see how well penicillin, then a fairly new drug, worked against syphilis, gonorrhoea and chancroid.
It was carried out on sex workers, prisoners in the state prison, patients in the state psychiatric hospital and some soldiers. According to the records, 1,600 adults were infected: 696 with syphilis, 772 with gonorrhoea and 142 with chancroid.
A related study ran from 1932 to 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, on about 400 poor Black American men who already had syphilis. They were left untreated and watched, and were never told they had the disease.
The Guatemala study was led by Dr John Cutler of the US Public Health Service, who later took part in the Tuskegee study.
US officials stressed that today's ethical rules, which did not exist half a century ago, protect against such experiments being repeated.
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