The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was a fundamentally unethical research project that began in 1932 and lasted 40 years ("U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee"). In the study, about 600 black men were told that they were being treated for “bad blood,” a colloquial term for syphilis (“U.S. Public Health”). In reality, the men were not being given any treatment and were merely acting as test subjects so that researchers from the U.S. Public Health Service could study the disease (“The Deadly Deception”). The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment clearly violated the ethical principles put forth in 1979 by the Belmont Report. The Belmont Report has three key components to protect the rights of human research participants: beneficence, autonomy, and justice.
In addition, the benefits need to outweigh the risks (Graziano and Raulin 69). In the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the risk to participants was certainly not minimized. The researchers knowingly withheld treatment from the men, meaning that the risk to the patients was actually greater if the men participated than if they didn’t. If the men hadn’t participated in the study, then they could have potentially received actual treatment. In fact, since penicillin was discovered as a cure for syphilis while the study was being conducted, the men could have been cured of the disease. However, the researchers withheld the cure and continued their study. Moreover, the potential benefits to the study would only have been finding proof that syphilis has the same effect on black people as on white people. They were not investigating any treatments; therefore, the risks to patients outweighed the