Many media outlets have noted that John C. Cutler, the late doctor who led the U.S. Public Health Service syphilis experiment on Guatemalan inmates and later participated in the Tuskegee experiment, defended the latter well into the 1990s, most famously for a 1993 PBS Nova documentary entitled The Deadly Deception.

Cutler: The Tuskegee study has been grossly misunderstood and misrepresented this way. And the fact was that it was concern for the black community, trying to set the stage for the best public health approach possible and the best therapy, that led to the study being carried out….

We were dealing with a very important study that was going to have the long-term results of which were actually to improve the quality of care for the black community so that these individuals were actually contributing to the work towards the improvement of the health of the black community rather than simply serving as merely guinea pigs for the study. And of course I was bitterly opposed to killing off the study for obvious reasons.

A graduate of Western Reserve University Medical School, Cutler joined the Public Health Service in 1942. His service at the Public Health Veneral Disease Research Laboratory, his obituary blandly notes, "led to his appointment to head a venereal disease research program of the Pan American Sanitary Bureau in Guatemala in 1948."

In fact, Cutler was involved with the project when it began in 1946. The PHS, along with the National Institutes of Health, the aforementioned Pan American Sanitary Bureau and the Guatemalan government, selected prisoners, mental patients, and soldiers to deliberately infect with syphilis (often with the assistance of prostitutes). Unlike in Tuskegee, the subjects of this experiment received doses of penicillin after they were infected, but it is not clear whether all of the subjects were cured. "The PHS," wrote Susan Reverby, the Wellesley College professor who discovered the records of the experiment, "was aware... that this was a study that would raise ethical questions."

Cutler's wife, Eliese Cutler, assisted her husband in the administration of the experiment. "She 'got to know the patients and helped keep things straight,' while also photographing them and the inoculations for the record."

Cutler joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health in 1967 as a professor of international health, serving as acting dean from 1968-1969. He left teaching in 1985, but remained a frequent presence at Pitt until his death in 2003. The GSPH sponsored a John C. Cutler Memorial Lecture in Public Health from 2007-2008. Eliese Cutler is listed as a donor in the $5,000-$9,999 to the GSPH.

"He was a pioneer who had firsthand experiences of living and working in the Third World," said a colleague of his after his death.

Philip D. Zelikow worked on German reunification as a senior National Security Council official under President George H.W. Bush. Together with Condoleezza Rice, he is the author of"Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1995)." Zelikow also served as executive director of the 9/11 Commission and as the top adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He is currently the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

Deutsche Welle: While most German politicians up to the fall of the Berlin Wall rhetorically supported the principle of reunification, few believed it would ever happen in their lifetime. Before things started to unravel in Eastern Europe, did you and other US officials believe Germany would be peacefully united in your lifetime?

Philip Zelikow: By the spring of 1989 several of us had come to believe that this was possible. And therefore we urged in writing that the older President Bush put the unification of Germany high on the agenda and spotlight the issue as a topic that we should look at and consider. And that then led to a series of statements, made both by President Bush and then later Chancellor Kohl in the spring and summer of 1989. President Bush stated again and again before the fall of the Berlin Wall that he supported German reunification and would be glad to see it. In the context of the increasing instability in Eastern Europe those comments had quite an impact in Germany and Western Europe.

Going even further back, would you have thought German reunification was possible prior to 1985?

I thought it unlikely. I think when I was a serving diplomat working in places like the Arms Control Talks in the mid 1980s we were resigned to the fact that Europe was going to remain divided for the foreseeable future. We thought that was tragic. By the end of 1988 several prominent people including Prime Minister Thatcher in Britain were happily declaring that the Cold War was over. That was not my view. Because I believe the Cold War did not end just when you had a divided Europe in which there was an understanding, in other words, a sort of modus Vivendi of Europe that could stably be divided....