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The Tuskegee Therapeutic Experiment

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In 1932 the United States Public Health Services (USPHS) initiated a non-therapeutic experiment with human subjects who lived in Tuskegee, Macon County in Alabama.1 The study was named “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”; a notorious medical experiment that has become a byword for racist and blatant disregard for human rights that takes place in the name of science.5 The goal of the study was to determine the natural course of untreated, latent syphilis in African American males.
In this study, 400 syphilis-infected males were enrolled and were matched with a control group of 200 uninfected subjects. Both groups were not permitted to receive medical treatment from local hospitals or physicians. The local hospitals were …show more content…

One of the main safeguards for the protection of human subjects in research is informed consent, which means informing the potential study subjects about all aspects of the study and their involvement in detail to be able to make an informed decision regarding their participation. Most codes of research establish specific items intended to be disclosed to the subjects to assure that subjects are given sufficient information. These items generally include: study procedure, their purposes, risks and anticipated benefits, alternative therapy, and a statement offering the subject the opportunity to ask questions and to withdraw at any time from the study. In case of Tuskegee study, none of the items were disclosed to the subjects. The subjects were told that they were receiving treatment for “bad blood”, a euphemism that was used locally to describe a host of many ailments. The subjects were not knowing that the bad blood was contagious and how the disease was transmitted. Researcher did not explain them that the disease was passed on from females to …show more content…

Moreover, the subjects were never given a choice to withdraw from the study once penicillin had become available; in fact, they were prevented from getting the penicillin, the treatment for syphilis from local

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