Argumentative Essay on Tuskegee Syphilis Study Ethics

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study took place in Macon County, Alabama from 1932 to 1972. The test subjects were 600 black males over the age of 25, 400 of the participants having syphilis, and the other 200 healthy men for the control group. They gathered the participants under the false premise that they would receive treatment for "bad blood", but they would never receive adequate treatment. The researchers wanted the patients to die of complications so they could know the true effects of the disease if gone untreated in blacks. The experiment was finally put to an end when the media exposed the experiment to the public eye. The original purpose of the experiment was to see if syphilis affected blacks more than whites since scientists believed that blacks were more severely affected by the disease. There were both positive and negative things that happened following the end of the study. African Americans across the country are more skeptical of the government and healthcare provided by them. This has led to increased death rates from preventable diseases such as in African Americans in the United States. But one of the most important positive outcomes following this experiment was that researchers had to obtain consent from all the people they wished to study and experiment with following this study due to all the things they weren't told. 

The study would be incredibly unethical to replicate today. First, it is already cruel for the ones conducting the study to not supply the treatment for participants even after effective treatments for syphilis, such as penicillin, became available. People are also now aware of the dangerous effects of syphilis so there would be no good reason to conduct another experiment like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The USPHS didn't even give treatment for the disease, they wanted the opposite and ensured that they could do everything in their power for the people in the experiment to not get any treatment. 

I believe that the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was a very unethical study since the researchers, doctors, and the government agencies such as the USPHS allowed for the experiment to go on for so long and let many of the participants suffer and die even since they already knew the effects of the disease if it went untreated.  

The unequal treatment between the original victims of syphilis and the group infected that were part of the control group relates to conflict theory since the scientists believed that there had to be unequal treatment in the experiment so they could know the effects of untreated syphilis in blacks.  

The researchers in the experiment already had bias before the experiment even started. To have a fair study of this nature, there must be no bias. Many scientists had believed that African Americans were too inferior, primitive, and moral compared to whites to survive in modern society. Studies that mistreated its participants such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study have made the basis for the code of ethics followed in studies that involve handling people and making them do certain things. The USPHS carried out institutional discrimination when they did not allow the blacks with syphilis to receive effective treatment for their disease, even when penicillin was already available.