Summary Of The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

The Tuskegee syphilis study was an experiment conducted by the United States Public Health Service in 1932. The purpose of this study was to determine the natural curse of latent syphilis in Black males who according to this article were prone to this disease. The subjects were chosen by Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr, Vonderlehr was sent to Macon County which was thought to have a large percentage of syphilitic black men to collect a sample of men with latent syphilis. It is mentioned in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks that “doctors might have actually injected those men with syphilis in order to study them” (Skloot 186). These subjects were mostly sharecroppers and tenant farmer that were mostly illiterate, poorly educated, and between the age of twenty-five and a sixty. In order to determine if someone had latent syphilis, Vonderlehr had to run a thorough physical on them.
In order for this study to be conducted 399 males subjects with syphilis and 201 male subjects without were tested.
And in order to gain the cooperation of the unknowing subject “They were told they were ill and were promised free care. Offered therapy, they became willing subjects” (Brandt 5) but the drugs they received were mostly ineffective or insufficient dosages. The USPHS did not inform the men that they were part of an experiment and wanted to maintain their interest until they could perform the final procedure which was a spinal tap to test for neurosyphilis. Because of the study, the subjects were denied actual medical treatment from other doctors most of the men who weren't in the control group had their life expectancy decreased by about twenty percent and “more than 30 percent of the test group autopsied had died directly from advanced syphilitic lesions” (Brandt
6) Things that made the Tuskegee syphilis study unethical where mainly the facts that the USPHS prevented the men from receiving proper treatment and nor did they even contemplate providing the subjects with penicillin or any other medicine which was available at the time. Arguably the most prevalent issue with the experiment was the fact that all 500 subjects were not given the opportunity to give their consent to participate in the study nor were any of them informed about the experiment which meant that the men did not submit to the experiment voluntarily. Major repercussions of the study are the realization that the notion that science is a value-free discipline has to be rejected and that there has to be great vigilance when assessing the impact of social values and attitudes on professional behavior.
The Tuskegee study violates much of the Nuremberg Code the most obvious of which are number one and four The first point of the Code essentially states that the subjects should be knowledgeable enough to understand risks, be given the legal capacity to give their consent, and should not be tricked or pressured into agreeing to terms an example would be in Taking the Least of You ‘“circle I do” (Skloot 4) to trick Moore to agree. The study violates this because they relied upon not knowledgeable people to become their subjects and they did not inform the subject about the experiment which means they didn't have free power of choice nor did they give their consent. The fifth point states that there should not be any experiment conducted with a definite probability of death or disabling injury. The Tuskegee study violates this since the whole point of the study was to observe what happened to a deadly disease when left untreated.By not treating the disease a minimum of twenty percent of the subjects died which is not supposed to happen.