The Infamous, 40-Year Tuskegee Study

On May 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a notorious research project involving hundreds of poor African-American men that took place from 1932 to 1972 in Macon County, Alabama. The men in the study had syphilis, a sexually transmitted infection, but didn’t know it. Instead they were told they had “bad blood” and given placebos, even after the disease became treatable with penicillin in the 1940s. Five of the study’s eight surviving participants were present when Clinton made his 1997 apology on behalf of the American people during a ceremony at the White House.


 


Known officially as the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, the study began at a time when there was no known treatment for the disease. After being recruited by the promise of free medical care, 600 men originally were enrolled in the project. The participants were primarily sharecroppers, and many had never before visited a doctor. Doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), which was running the study, informed the participants—399 men with latent syphilis and a control group of 201 others who were free of the disease—they were being treated for bad blood, a term commonly used in the area at the time to refer to a variety of ailments.

The men were monitored by health workers but only given placebos such as aspirin and mineral supplements, despite the fact penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis in 1947. PHS researchers convinced local physicians in Macon County not to treat the participants, and research was done at the Tuskegee Institute (Now called Tuskegee University, the school was founded in 1881 with Booker T. Washington at its first teacher.) In order to track the disease’s full progression, researchers provided no effective care as the men died, went blind or insane or experienced other severe health problems due to their untreated syphilis.

In the mid-1960s, a PHS venereal disease investigator in San Francisco named Peter Buxton found out about the Tuskegee study and expressed his concerns to his superiors that it was unethical. In response, PHS officials formed a committee to review the study but ultimately opted to continue it, with the goal of tracking the participants until all had died, autopsies were performed and the project data could be analyzed. As a result, Buxton leaked the story to a reporter friend, who passed it on to her fellow reporter, Jean Heller of the Associated Press. Heller broke the story in July 1972, prompting public outrage and forcing the study to shut down. By that time, 28 participants had perished from syphilis, 100 more had passed away from related complications, at least 40 spouses had been diagnosed with it and the disease had been passed to 19 children at birth.

In 1973, Congress held hearings on the Tuskegee study and human experiments, and the following year the study’s surviving participants, along with the heirs of those who died, received a $10 million out-of-court settlement. Additionally, new guidelines were issued to protect human subjects in U.S. government-funded research projects. (In 1947, the Nuremberg Code was established in response to Nazi physicians forcibly performing gruesome experiments on prisoners in concentration camps during World War II. The document set forth basic ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects, such as the requirement that a person must give informed consent before participating in an experiment.)

Link: http://www.history.com/news/the-infamous-40-year-tuskegee-study?cmpid=TWITTER_TWITTER__20170516&linkId=37655380