Cutler John Charles

John Charles Cutler, M.D. (June 29, 1915 – February 8, 2003) was a senior surgeon, and the acting chief of the venereal disease program in the United States Public Health Service. Following his death in 2003, his involvement in several controversial and unethical medical experiments regarding syphilis was revealed, including the Guatemala and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Cutler was born on June 29, 1915 in Cleveland, Ohio, to Grace Amanda Allen and Glenn Allen Cutler. He graduated from Western Reserve University Medical School in 1941, and joined the Public Health Service in 1942. In 1943 he worked as a medical officer in the U.S. Public Health Venereal Disease Research Laboratory on Staten Island.

Cutler oversaw the syphilis experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s, during which doctors deliberately infected an estimated 1500 Guatemalans, including orphans as young as nine, soldiers, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis without the informed consent of the subjects. This study not only violated the hippocratic oath but it echoed Nazi crimes exposed around the same time at the Nuremberg trials. In 1954, Cutler was in charge of experiments at Sing Sing prison to see if a vaccine made from the killed syphilis bacterium, would protect prisoners against infection when he later exposed them to the bacterium. Those infected were later treated with penicillin. Cutler became assistant surgeon general in 1958.

In the 1960s, Cutler was involved in the ongoing Tuskegee syphilis experiment, during which several hundred African-American men who had contracted syphilis were observed, but left untreated. In “The Deadly Deception”, the 1993 Nova documentary about the Tuskegee experiments, Cutler states, “It was important that they were supposedly untreated, and it would be undesirable to go ahead and use large amounts of penicillin to treat the disease, because you’d interfere with the study.”

In 1967 Cutler was appointed professor of international health at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also served as chairman of the department of health administration and acting dean of the Graduate School of Public Health in 1968–1969. He died on February 8, 2003 at Western Pennsylvania Hospital in Pittsburgh. The university started a lecture series in his name after his death, but discontinued it in 2008 when his role in the Tuskegee experiment emerged.