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What's The Purpose Of The Tuskegee Syphilis Study?

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What's The Purpose Of The Tuskegee Syphilis Study?
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was created in 1932, with many different experiments and one goal: to study the history of syphilis to get treatment for blacks. The U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) wanted to determine the natural course of untreated syphilis in black males. It’s main purpose was to justify treatment programs for everyone, no matter the color of their skin. The researchers studied the men, who were all prone to latent syphilis, and needed to determine how the syphilis will manifest in their bodies so they can provide proper treatment.The subjects consisted of 400 syphilitic men, as well as 200 uninfected men. The uninflected men served as the control, or constant of this experiment. Dr. Raymond Vonderlehr, a researcher sent to …show more content…
The researchers had no respect for their test subjects, medical researchers should have had to obtain informed consent from their study participants. This means that participants must be given accurate information about their circumstances and treatment options so that they can decide what will happen to them. The subjects also were not aware of all of the potential risk factors that would influence their decision to participate in the trial. Researchers faced much backlash on their experiment, especially from articles in newspapers. In Taking the Least of You, author Rebecca Skloot states, “All of the important research that has been done over the years- it all depended on free and unlimited access to tissues” (Skloot 14). This quote from an article supports the fact that tissues are needed, but proper consent should have been requested. Because the disease was never treated, syphilis was genetically passed down through generations of African Americans. An additional repercussion was that a panel was created to review the study and declare it ethnically injusticed. This panel stopped advising the study, and additional groups to prevent something like this from happening were created. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study highlighted issues in race and science that were prevalent in society at the time, and even

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