Tuskegee. Nazi experiments. The needless deaths of babies. The rhetoric certainly heated up at a congressional hearing on bioethics held on 8 May when the topic turned to US government-funded studies in developing countries aimed at preventing the transmission of HIV from mothers to infants. After listening to criticisms of the studies by the Washington, DC-based Public Citizen's Health Research Group, Representative Christopher Shays (R-CN), chair of the Subcommittee on Human Resources, opined:“It does blow my mind.”

Public Citizen, a consumer-advocacy organization, has been waging a high-profile campaign in recent weeks to modify the trials, arguing that it is no less than mind blowing that they include as control subjects pregnant women who are given no treatment to prevent maternal transmission of HIV. But at the hearing, AIDS researchers and their sponsors vigorously defended the trials, which are under way in Africa, Thailand, and the Caribbean, testifying that they may answer critical questions for HIV-infected women in those countries. Several people called to testify also expressed dismay at the inflammatory rhetoric and the aura of an emerging crisis fostered by Public Citizen, noting that the studies were thoroughly debated before they were launched. As Harold Varmus, head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said to the subcommittee,“The issues that were raised by Public Citizen and brought to your attention are not new ones.”