Feb 17
HMS Event
Tuskegee Healing, the Moral Determinants of Health, and the Ethics of Researc
Research Ethics Consortium: Tuskegee Healing, the Moral Determinants of Health, and the Ethics of Research on Black Health
February 17, 2023 | 12:30 PM - 2 PM ET | Live on Zoom
Learn More and Register
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?
This event is co-hosted by:
Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics
National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care at Tuskegee University