Research Ethics: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is one of the most horrendous examples of research carried out in disregard of basic ethical principles of conduct. The publicity surrounding the study was one of the major influences leading to the codification of protection for human subjects.
In 1928, the director of medical services for the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a Chicago-based charity, approached the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) to consider ways to improve the health of African Americans in the South. At the time, the PHS had just finished a study of the prevalence of syphilis among black employees of the Delta Pine and Land Company of Mississippi. About 25% of the sample of over 2000 had tested positive for syphilis.
The PHS and the Rosenwald fund collaborated in treating these individuals. Subsequently, the treatment program was expanded to include five additional counties in the southern U.S.: Albemarle County, Virginia; Glynn County, Georgia; Macon County, Alabama; Pitt County, North Carolina; and Tipton County, Tennessee (Jones, 1981).
During the set-up phase of the treatment program, the Great Depression began. The Rosenwald Fund was hit hard and had to withdraw its support. Without the Rosenwald Fund, the PHS did not have the resources to implement treatment.
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http://www.tuskegee.edu/global/story.asp?s=1207598Unfortunately it doesn't alter the thesis of the piece and in many other cases there were active agents in the medical profession who purposefully impacted folks negatively for experimental purposes.
Here is one of the more "well known" series of cases and to be sure there are many others we know little or nothing about:
When medicine went wrong: how Americans were used illegally as guinea pigs:
According to Rep. Philip R. Sharf (D.-Ind.), former chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power, "For the public at large, the evidence that some of these experiments were scientifically and ethically irresponsible is chilling. Today, as in the 1940s, there are few settings in which any of us is more vulnerable than in dealing with the medical establishment."
Some human radiation experiments were conducted in the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s, but others were performed during the supposedly better enlightened 1960s and 1970s. It is possible that the program involved more than 1,000 people. These experiments were conducted by the Manhattan Project, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and the Energy Research and Development Administration, all predecessor agencies of the Department of Energy.
During 1945-47, as part of the Manhattan Project, patients who were diagnosed as having diseases that gave them life expectancies of less than 10 years were injected with plutonium. Besides the University of Califomia Hospital, such studies were carried out at the Manhattan District Hospital, Oak Ridge, Tenn.; Strong Memorial Hospital, Rochester, N.Y.; and the University of Chicago. Despite the original diagnoses, seven of the 18 patients lived longer than 10 years and five survived for more than 20. Internal investigations by the AEC found that informed consent was not granted in the initial experiments, since even the word "plutonium" was classified during World War II, and living patients were not informed that they had been injected with plutonium until 1974.
On July 18, 1947, three doctors and a nurse entered Ward B at the University of California Hospital and injected plutonium into 36-year-old Elmer Allen's left leg. Three days later, the leg was amputated at mid-thigh. His hospital chart states that the limb was sent to pathology for radiological study. Allen had been misdiagnosed as having a pre-existing bone cancer. In fact, he had fallen from a train in the late summer of 1946 and had injured his left knee. Hence, his condition was far from terminal. Allen lived until June 10, 1991, with horrible complications resulting from the plutonium experiment. He suffered from alcoholism, epileptic seizures, and eventually was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic, which his family doctor believes resulted from his feelings about how he had been exploited in the plutonium experiment.
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1272/is_n2598_v123/ai_16805720/Plutonium Files: How the U.S. Secretly Fed Radioactivity to Thousands of Americans
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AMY GOODMAN: And what were the results?
EILEEN WELSOME: Basically, they confirmed that thousands and thousands of experiments had been done on U.S. Citizens. That the victims were the most vulnerable people in our society: the young, the disenfranchised, the poor, people of color, people who did not know enough to ask questions. In other words, the subjects were not doctor’s children or friends of their doctors; they were people who were vulnerable.
AMY GOODMAN: And how many places did this happen in the United States? The school in Massachusetts, the Cincinnati test, Elmer Allen was at the University of California Berkeley, how many sites were these government scientists working in?
EILEEN WELSOME: There were hundreds of sites. There were private hospitals, public hospitals, military installations, orphanages. About any place that doctor was working where they might be able to get a grant....
http://www.democracynow.org/2004/5/5/plutonium_files_how_the_u_s
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