What Was The Significance Of The Tuskegee Experiment

In 1932 the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” began. The original intent was to learn the effects of syphilis on the body. The study began with 600 black men and was intended to last six months. Shamefully, the ethics of this experiment were nonexistent as misinformation and deception led the experiment to last a striking forty years. A primary object for the disgust surrounding the experiment was the lack of consent. Currently, the Institutional Review Board (IRB) requires informed consent from participants in any research study (p. 50, 42). Although the IRB did not exist until the 1970s, after the conclusion of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, there were certainly laws and measures put in place to prevent mistreatment of research participants that came about during the near half-century duration of the experiment. As stated previously, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study began with 600 black men. The researchers chose an impoverished town with the understanding that these men would be willing to participate and also not have the background to recognize or resist any unreliable factors in the study. The men of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study were deceived about the
In The Deadly Deception it is noted that the study persisted through multiple decades and major historic events. An illustration of this is that those involved in conducting the Tuskegee Syphilis Study did not understand or accept that their actions were comparable to those of the Nazis in regards to their treatment of human subjects. The disillusionment of the researchers is apparent through their negligence of laws, facts, and human decency. When the study finally concluded in 1972, the participants were not given an adequate debriefing (p. 47). One subject only found out the truth about the experiment through reading about the twenty-eight deaths in the