Tuskegee’s experience is one of those real stories in which there are villains who seem to come out of a crazy imagination. This story also has its own hero, Peter Buxtun, who has demonstrated an inspiring truth: sometimes it only takes one man to decide to do whatever it takes to change everything.
For many, the Tuskegee experience is the longest and most infamous in American history, it was a human trial and lasted a total of 40 years: it began in 1932 and ended in 1972. Among other things, this study shows that the Nazis were by no means the only or the first to use human beings as objects of study in the laboratory.
- Tuskegee’s experiment was an important step in bioethics.
- Before its discovery a whole legal framework had already been designed to protect those under scientific study.
- However.
- When the scandal of this experiment arose.
- These standards were strengthened and precautions strengthened.
“Intellectual honesty is of paramount importance in experimental work. “William Ian Beardmore Beveridge?
Tuskegee’s experiment began in 1932 and originally aimed to study the effects of syphilis on people infected with Tuskegee. At the time, very little was known about this infection and the treatments available were scarce and ineffective.
For example, Dr. Taliaferro Clark, a member of the Venereal Diseases Section of the U. S. Public Health Service, is a member of the U. S. Public Health Service. But it’s not the first time In Tuskegee, Alabama, he decided to monitor the progression of the disease in infected and untreated people. or eight months was made up of poor black peasants, the vast majority of whom were illiterate.
Other prestigious doctors of the time joined Clark’s studio. Initially, 399 infected men and 240 healthy men were recruited; would serve as a control group in this experience with people.
Everything began to go as planned, but a year later, Dr. Clark withdrew from the research team because he disagreed with the direction of the study.
From the beginning of Tuskegee’s experiment, ethically questionable procedures existed; initially, the subjects studied did not know the details of the research, i. e. they were not informed of what would be studied or the method to be used. words, there was no informed consent.
In addition, they have not been diagnosed; they were simply told that they had “bad blood,” a generic term very open to interpretation. They were encouraged to participate in the study with the promise of free medical treatment, transportation to the clinic, food and coverage for funeral expenses at the event of death.
In practice, what has been done with them has been to allow the disease to develop and observe its effects on the body. A total of 600 people were studied. One of the most questionable points was the fact that, in the 1940s, science considered penicillin to be effective against syphilis, but researchers refused to administer the drug to patients.
Is the same thing true? Volunteers were asked to perform a procedure with the following message: “Last chance for free special treatment. “What they did were lumbar punctures, that is, a sample more than a treatment. One of the guards congratulated his colleague on this message and praised his ability to cheat.
Dr. Peter Buxton came to the United States as a baby; his family had fled Czechoslovakia for fear of the Nazis; in 1966 he was already a researcher of venereal diseases in San Francisco; that same year, he sent a letter to Tuskegee’s experiment, expressing serious concerns about the morality of the study.
Buxtun received no response, but continued to insist on his solitary struggle for the next eight years; however, seeing that he was not getting any results, he decided to go to the press, the news appeared first on the Washington Star and a day later. it was posted on the cover of The New York Times. The charges were so serious that Tuskegee’s experiment took only a day to complete.
By the end of the study, 28 of the “volunteers” had died of the disease; another 100 had poor quality of life due to related complications. The most serious is that 40 women became infected and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton publicly apologized to those affected. This experience has undermined many Americans’ confidence in public health services.