Despite Being “Known, Highly Promiscuous and Active”: Presumed Heterosexuality in the USPHS’s STD Inoculation Study, 1946–48
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Sexually Transmitted Disease Inoculation Study of the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) was a short-term deliberate exposure experiment into the prevention of venereal diseases. Between 1946 and 1948, over 1,300 Guatemalan prisoners, psychiatric patients, soldiers, and sex workers were exposed to syphilis, gonorrhoea, and chancroid. USPHS researchers initially proposed hiring sex workers to "naturally" transmit venereal diseases to male subjects who would then be given various prophylaxes. The researchers were interested in studying the effectiveness of new preventative measures. In other words, the USPHS study was designed to transmit venereal diseases heterosexually from an "infected" female body to the men who, it was assumed, were sexually isolated subjects. However, the researchers did record instances of male-to-male disease transmission among their subject populations, instances that challenged the presumption of heterosexuality on which the study was based.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".