Tuskegee Syphilis Study

Reverby, S.H. (ed.), Tuskegee s Truths Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2000. 

In the United States it was as a direct result of the revelation of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that the next U.S. medical ethics initiative emerged. The National Research Act of 1974 was passed (Public Law 93348), which required regulatory protection for human subjects and created the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. In 1979 this commission produced the Belmont Report, named after the Smithsonian Institution s Conference Center, where the discussions were first held in 1976. The report established three ethical principles to allow problems to be solved in the area of ethics in clinical research (1) respect for persons, (2) beneficence, and (3) justice. In general terms, these categories were equivalent to informed consent, risk-benefit assessment, and an appropriate choice of subjects for the research. 

Some of the most ethically troublesome human experiments, such as the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male and the Human... 

These ethical tenets are literally written in blood in the blood of millions of victims of the Holocaust of hundreds of African-American syphilitic men in Tuskegee, Alabama, unjustly sentenced to death through non-treatment of syphilis when treatment was available of millions of AIDS victims sentenced to death through an early purposeful avoidance of study and treatment of thousands of women and ethnic minorities excluded from clinical studies because gender and ethnic differences made studies more difficult, expensive, and involved. In many, perhaps most, of these cases, a disdain for the omitted or ignored constituency has played a role in the mistakes or deficiencies of clinical studies. In ethics, including biomedical and bioengineering ethics, we learn from the mistakes and sins of the past. 

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