Tuskegee Healing, the Moral Determinants of Health, and the Ethics of Research on Black Health

The USPHS Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male at Tuskegee and Macon County began in 1932, after US Public Health Service doctors recorded a 39.8% prevalence of syphilis among patients seen in Macon County, Alabama during a treatment study in one corner of the county. While these data might have raised many possible research questions, USPHS doctors chose to focus on the natural history of untreated syphilis.

They not only denied participants the treatments available in the 1930’s; they also chose to continue to study untreated syphilis long after highly-effective, inexpensive, and extraordinarily safe treatment with penicillin became widely available. While the research methods they used are now universally condemned, far less attention has been given to more fundamental questions about the ethics of research, including:

What should the goals of research even be? Who should decide those? What are the most crucial ethical characteristics of relationships between investigators and research subjects?

Introductory Remarks:

Carmen J. Thornton, MPH, MCHES
Director of Research, Development, and Workforce, American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
Consultant, Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation
Granddaughter of Fred Tyson, subject in USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee
Presenters:

Susan M. Reverby, PhD
Marion Butler McLean Professor Emerita in the History of Ideas
Professor Emerita of Women's and Gender Studies, Wellesley College
Author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy
Jesse Milan, Jr., JD
President and CEO, AIDS United
Wangui Muigai
Assistant Professor, Brandeis University
Greenwall Faculty Scholar, class of 2025
Moderator:

Lachlan Forrow, MD
Director, Ethics & Palliative Care Program, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine, Part-time, Harvard Medical School
President, The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship
Commentator:

David Augustin Hodge, Sr., DMin, PhD
Associate Director of Education and Associate Professor, National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care, Tuskegee University

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