The Tuskegee Experiment was a medical study conducted in the US from 1932 to 1972, in which nearly 400 black Americans with syphilis were not offered treatment. The study lacked informed consent and caused harm to participants, including the spread of syphilis to wives and children. The experiment triggered extensive ethics legislation and public outcry, leading to its cancellation and a formal apology from the US government in 1997. The Tuskegee Experiment is viewed as a shameful event in American history.
The Tuskegee Experiment was an infamous medical experiment conducted in the United States between 1932 and 1972 in which nearly 400 black Americans with syphilis were not offered medical treatment, allowing researchers to see the course of the disease. The events of the Tuskegee experiment triggered extensive ethics legislation, including the National Research Act, and the experiment attracted great public attention. Many people view the Tuskegee Experiment as an extremely shameful event in American history, and several organizations including the Centers for Disease Control have extensive archives on the experiment that are available to interested members of the public who want to learn more.
There were so many problems with the Tuskegee experiment that it’s hard to even begin to list them. The architects of the experiment claimed they were doing valuable research on the disease, but even at the time many people doubted this, especially after 1947 when penicillin treatment for syphilis became available. The primary value of the study subjects for the US Public Health Service and Tuskegee Institute researchers was as autopsy subjects, as they said they would show that untreated syphilis caused extensive heart damage in blacks.
The research subjects were extremely poor black sharecroppers in rural Alabama. The study even lacked the rudiments of informed consent, with participants being told they were receiving treatment for “bad blood.” Over the course of the study, the men were periodically called in to receive “treatments” which were actually medical tests used to measure the severity of their conditions, and the research team documented the progression of syphilis. The men were offered no treatment and, in fact, were deliberately denied available treatments for syphilis, an action that is contrary to the most basic of medical ethics.
Over the course of the study, 40 wives were infected with syphilis and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis. A number of men have died incredibly painfully and sustained deaths from untreated syphilis, and some researchers of the program have begun to question its merits. Several whistleblowers independently wrote concerned letters, but the study didn’t really start gaining attention until 1972, when a reporter named Jean Heller broke the story in the Washington Star.
When Americans learned that black men had been allowed to suffer from advanced syphilis without treatment, public outcry led to the study’s cancellation, along with the prompt passage of several laws designed to spell out the basic medical ethics that all experiments in the future they would expect to observe. In 1973, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) won a nine million dollar lawsuit, using the proceeds to fund medical care for experiment victims. The US government has also agreed to provide free lifelong medical care to the men along with their wives and surviving children.
It wasn’t until 1997 that the federal government issued a formal apology for the Tuskegee experiment, in the form of a speech by President Bill Clinton. The Tuskegee experiment continues to anger many black Americans, who compare it to the medical experiments performed by the Nazis in German concentration camps. Not only was the Tuskegee experiment morally unreasonable, it was also medically useless, having no practical value, making it all the more shameful.
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