I. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study Revisited
The ultimate lesson that many Americans saw in the Tuskegee Study was the need to protect society from scientific pursuits that ignored human values.
A critical examination of the most widely disseminated papers, books, reports and other written documents about the Tuskegee Study reveals that the “Study” was misleading in its purpose as well as its method of securing participants. According to James H. Jones, “[t]he Tuskegee Study had nothing to do with treatment. No new drugs were tested, nor were any efforts made to establish the efficacy of old forms of treatment. It was a nontherapeutic experiment, aimed at compiling data on the effects of the spontaneous evolution of syphilis on black males.” This section will explore how the data was compiled by assessing the institutions involved, the selected human subjects, and duration of the experiment in order to contextualize the biomedical significance of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
