Beginning in 1932, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male was launched by the United States Public Health Service. The study focused on African American males in Macon County, Alabama who were infected with syphilis. Participants in the study were told that they would be receiving a free treatment for syphilis, a sexually transmitted disease that plagued many black males at the time. Instead of administering treatment, however, the government doctors who carried out the study provided them with placebo medication such as useless sugar pills, even going as far as performing spinal taps under the pretense that the procedure was part of the patients’ treatment. For a period of time a cure for the disease did not exist. This changed in the 1940s with the release of penicillin, a drug that had shown positive results in battling syphilis. The doctors, however, did not grant the patients access to penicillin; in fact, they actively refused it to them: participants in the study were turned away at treatment centers and even barred from entering the military, which gave treatment for syphilis infected soldiers. The experiment was an effort to discover if the disease affected black patients differently than white ones; the study stemmed from widely held beliefs in inherent differences between black and white human beings. In this regard, the study was not worth pursuing as nothing scientifically useful was gained by its results. Scientific progress is not necessarily a must, especially when it comes at the cost of human life; dozens of the participants in the Tuskegee syphilis study were simply allowed to die while the doctors presiding over them made no effort to save their lives, even after penicillin became available which cured the disease. Limitations must be placed on the pursuit of scientific progress, specifically that unwilling humans should not have their well-being damaged for the sole purpose of scientific advancements. The Tuskegee experiment was unethical for the following reasons. First, the syphilis patients in the Tuskegee study became involved under the false pretense of being treated for the disease. They were lied to from the beginning. Second, the health of the patients was allowed to degenerate without any intervention from the presiding doctors. In some cases, this occurred all the way up until the death of a number of the participants. In addition, the doctors actively refused the patients treatment after a cure for the disease became available. Not only did they not intervene when the patients’ health began to worsen as a result of the disease, but they went to great lengths to ensure the patients did not receive the treatment they needed. Third, the study was an attempt to make scientific gains at the expense of human life. The doctors and scientists involved used the men of Macon County as a means to an end, acting with complete disregard for the humanity of the patients involved. The social and cultural forces that lead to the creation of such an experiment were largely related to racial misconceptions. As mentioned above, the study was an attempt to discover if syphilis took a different course in black males than white ones. However, there was no mention of a control group involving white males that were subjected to the same non-treatment policy that the Macon County men were. The consequences of this study are mixed: some positive, some negative. Negatively, the study resulted in widespread distrust for the medical profession by African Americans and others, a distrust still lingers even today. Postive changes did result from the experiment. Now, full informed consent is required for any research study being conducted involving human participants. In addition, the Tuskegee study brought increased focus on the importance of human rights in regards to science. Since the study, medical research has changed for the better, as the value of human beings has raised in
comparison to the importance of scientific research, as evidenced by the creation of documents such as the Belmont Report that set ethical guidelines for the medical profession. Unfortunately, it often takes a tragedy such as the Tuskegee experiment for a society to make positive, necessary changes, the likes of which have been made here.