The infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a study carried out over a period of forty years from 1932 to 1972, is a disturbing example of what happens when research oversteps the bounds of what is considered ethical. It was carried out in Tuskegee Institute by various doctors and public officials, who selected 400 African-Americans believed to have syphilis and tracked the progression of the disease over time. Even when penicillin became available in the mid- 1940s as a treatment for syphilis, the test subjects were refused treatment in order to ensure the experiment would not be compromised, and as a result more than one hundred people died a preventable death due to disease before the experiment ended. This, along with the scientists withholding …show more content…
Public Health Service (USPHS) and was designed to examine the progression of syphilis in African-American males, under the assumption that they were naturally more sexually promiscuous than white males and thus more likely to get the disease. No whites were selected for the sample, and the majority of the people chosen were illiterate tenant farmers and sharecroppers. To convince them to take part in the study, the researchers told the subjects that treatment for their disease would be given, even though there were no plans to provide any cure. In all, about 400 people-200 healthy controls and 200 infected individuals-were beguiled into participating in an experiment where the final goal was to let the disease kill them and then perform autopsies on them to study the effects of syphilis on the body. They were also given so-called “cures” such as spinal taps and mercurial ointment, which were at best ineffective and at worst potentially harmful. The researchers kept a strict watch on all their test subjects, keeping them oblivious to their true intent and barring them from any chance of receiving a real cure (although a handful did manage to get penicillin from outside sources in the early 1950s). Fortunately, once the first accounts of this corrupt experiment were made publicly available in 1972, the USPHS was unable to continue the