Ethical Issues In The Reaction To The Tuskegee Case

I do not think something this big-scaled and unethical can be run by the government in today’s society (at least, not publicly). If something this unethical happened today, especially targeting a group of people, the media would blow up. However, there are still unresolved issues of racism today (such as the recent police cruelty and the United Airlines case)--because the Tuskegee case was an issue of racism as much as it was of an ethical one--so there is a possibility of something like this happening again. Not to mention people’s curiosity is endless as well as their cruelty.

- Much of the regulatory apparatus and ethical guidelines surrounding informed consent and medical research on human subjects described in the textbook is a reaction to the Tuskegee syphilis study and similar abuses in human history. Do you think the reaction was appropriate and adequate?
It ensured that basic human rights would remain untouched for future clinical experiments, or clinical treatments in general. I was shocked to see that when the board talked about continuing the study, only one person saw it as unethical and cruel. And I do realize I keep going back to issues of racism, but that was the problem; the researchers just didn’t see the subjects as humans. Would the study even have started if the population was white? I do understand that the study was aiming to find the difference of disease progression in different races, but if they wanted real results, they should have randomized the population. I also found it disturbing that the person who proposed the study thought the area was a perfect lab--he was thinking about the disease first rather than the people living