Ethics: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Jose Garcia
ECC-052
10:00 am
2/5/2009
Ethics: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
The historic study the “Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment” violated each ethical guideline of research. The experiment was conducted on 399 black men, who were diagnosed with syphilis, by the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) during the years of 1932 and 1972.
Most of the men that participated in the experiment were illiterate farmhands from one of the poorest areas of Alabama. According to Borgna Brunner, these men being who they were, were “grossly disadvantaged lot in life [which] made them easy to manipulate.” PHS clearly planned to coerce these men for their own gain. One of the ways that the government went about doing this was by offering free medical, and also sending out promotional letters reading: “Last Chance for Special Free Treatment.”
Though in 1964 when it became law to receive informed consent from the participants, when the experiment involved human beings, by the World Health Organization’s Declaration of Helsinki, PHS continued to, as described by 1972 news anchor Harry Reasoner, use “human beings as laboratory animals in a long and inefficient study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone.”
The ethical guidelines of research call for “limited” deception. The U.S. Public Health Service felt that the only way to carry out their study was to completely deceive their subjects. This much is clear from the fact that they do not ever disclose to the “patients” that they are suffering from syphilis, but instead tell them that they are treating them for “bad blood,” when actually the doctors had no intention in treating them.
After an experiment involving human beings, it is required that the subjects be debriefed on the results of the study, which failed to happen in this experiment. Some of the consequences of the men not being debriefed were that they continued to spread the syphilis to their sexual partners...