Johns Hopkins University, together with other institutions, is facing a $1 billion lawsuit. The case has been brought by nearly 800 research participants and their families. This is regarding experiments conducted in Guatemala during the 1940s that involved some participants getting sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) like gonorrhea, according to The Baltimore Sun.
Back in August 2011, a US federal bioethics commission released a report detailing its probe of the experiments, finding ethical misconduct. A year earlier, President Barack Obama had apologized to the participants and their families.
The new lawsuit has been filed in the Baltimore Circuit Court. The suit names, in addition to the university, the Rockefeller Foundation and Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) as defendants. Officials at both Johns Hopkins and Rockefeller told The Baltimore Sun they found the experiments “deplorable . . . unconscionable,” and “morally repugnant,” respectively. However, the BMS pharmaceutical company declined to comment.
In a sense, once the experiments became public and Obama made his 2010 statement, legal action was invevitable. At the time, The New York Times stated in an editorial: “Congress and the [Obama] administration must step up more than they have, by offering financial restitution to Guatemalans with plausible claims of harm. . . . Justice has not been done.”
