Thursday, September 2, 2010
Tuskegee Syphilis
This experiment took place during the 1920-1930. The time period when america was the most racist. Along with that, america was developing and scienctists where searching for the cure to syphilis. These scienctists acted in an immoral way, they lied to the black men and told them that they had "bad blood" and that they were being treated for it. Where as they were just testing on them and trying to find a cure for syphilis. In other words Human Beings were being treated as Laboratory Animals. Even though they told them that they would provide them free medical care, it was a lie, they would label it as "final chance for free check up", but they were just testing and experimenting on them. The doctors targeted the uneducated men to undertake this experiment. When this spilled, it brought a horrible name to science. Even after they had found the cure, they refused to give it to the people who they experimented on, this proves that they were immoral in treating them in this way and experimenting on them like they did not have any rights.
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I don't believe that this experiment gave all of science as a whole a bad name, i just believe certain parts. I think it opened up a world where the ways in which scientific research were conducted needed to be watched and considered legally. This experiment was more for medical research, rather than science as a whole as medicine was the focus. The fact that the subjects weren't treated humanely, logically, or carefully, it surely left a stain on the tablecloth of scientific research. But, I do not think that because of this incident, science as a whole was smeared.
ReplyDeleteI think it depends on who's perspective you look at the event from- after the study was published and became known as one of science's most shameful experiments, perhaps as an African American person whose family member participated and died as a result of this study and the "free medical care" the subjects were to receive, I would probably feel that blaming science as a whole was a reasonable accusation. Considering that these scientists conducted this experiment without any interference from an outside party (I.e. lawyers, ethics committees, activists, etc.), and these scientists believed that the lives of these people were worth their curiosity- which is what initially took the experiment way out of control- it definitely seems to me like an experiment like this, once highly publicized and critiqued, could cast a shadow over all scientific experiments being conducted past and present, and also cause me to question why ethics were not being established earlier than the study to have prevented this from happening.
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