ETHICALLY IMPOSSIBLE” STD Research in Guatemala from 1946-1948 
tests they were conducting. Given this, the Commission did not attempt 
to identify how many people were clinically infected or how many people 
received adequate treatment. In the case of syphilis, for example, the sero- 
logical testing conducted was unreliable and highly dependent on the skill, 
precise method, and consistency of an individual laboratory and the quality 
of the clinical assessment. As a result, the database focuses on the number of 
individuals exposed to, rather than infected with, STD. 
Lastly, due to time and resource constraints, research records deemed of greatest 
significance, specifically the majority of the clinical and laboratory notebooks, 
were double-coded (meaning by two or more people), but the majority of 
records were single-coded. Periodic audits were conducted of all work. 
Figures 6 , 7, and 8 
Figures 6, 7, and 8 were created using amalgamated data from the Subject 
Database derived from the Cutler Documents. As Dr. Cutler’s retrospective 
counts of his experiments are inconsistent, these figures are based on an inde- 
pendent count of days on which intentional exposure to STD occurred for 
an individual or population. This exposure day count excludes days on which 
commercial sex workers alone were exposed, as Dr. Cutler did not consider 
these instances “experiments” or the sex workers as “subjects.” 
154 
