In the aftermath of the Jeremiah Wright controversy, I keep reading that his assertion that the US government “lied about inventing the AIDS virus as a means of genocide against people of color” is understandable because, after all, the government infected black men with syphilis as part of the Tuskegee experiment (this, for example, is typical of such comments).
The Tuskegee experiment was one of the darkest chapters in the annals of medical research and racism. There is absolutely no question that the researchers involved violated the rules of medical ethics in an egregious manner by finding 399 black men who suffered from syphilis and observing the progression of the disease while denying treatment to them.
The truth is bad enough; there’s no need to exaggerate what happened in order to feel a sense of outrage. But the truth is that no one was ever purposely infected with syphilis by anyone in the US Public Health Service, the group in charge of the experiment. The subjects had already contracted the disease in the natural way, and were recruited after their diagnoses (there was also a control group of 201 black men who did not have the disease).
The experiment is not only a cautionary tale of racism and inhumane treatment, it’s one of hubris in which the doctors initially involved began the study with benign goals and methods in mind, but later researchers became so consumed with their research that they lost sight of the humanity of their subjects.
When the project officially began in 1932, syphilis was widespread among the black population in the area, and the available treatments (for people of any race) were highly risky, mostly ineffective, and frequently extremely toxic—even, at times, fatal. The natural course of the disease, on the other hand, was variable, and sometimes people lived out their lives without too many further health problems. Furthermore, when the study was in the planning stages (during the late 1920s), the initial idea was to “record the natural history of syphilis in hopes of justifying treatment programs for blacks”—treatment they would in all likelihood not have been getting but for the study.
This, of course, was about as different as can be from what the experiment later became. The idea was to withhold treatment for 6-8 months and then administer the best treatment available at the time (the most serious symptoms of syphilis develop very slowly, over the course of many years). However, before the experiment could get that far, the stock market crashed in 1929 and the group that had pledged the funds to finance the treatment withdrew its support.
This left the researchers in a bind. They probably should have stopped right there. But, given the fact that the men involved were not going to be getting any treatment without the study, it probably didn’t seem unethical to change the goal to that of merely studying the natural course of the disease. Since at the time there was no effective help to be had for these men, why not learn something along the way?
There’s no question that the project was severely compromised even at the outset. The men were not told they had syphilis, for example. However, this happened in an age when truth was often kept from patients about terrible and especially fatal illnesses. Patients of all races were also routinely used in experiments of dubious morality, minus anything we would now call “informed consent”—which does not make it right; it merely makes it more commonplace.
The most severe ethical and racist problems developed later. The study, originally envisioned as short-term, turned into years, then decades. As time went on, no doubt the doctors became more and more highly invested in the outcome.
The situation of the Tuskegee subjects became far more pernicious with the development of penicillin in the late 1940’s. It’s paradoxical because now, for the first time, the cure available for syphilis was a real one, reliable and safe, almost always nontoxic and effective.
This is the point at which the experiment segues into a true horror show. Treatment was purposely withheld as the men slowly declined. The whole terrible mess continued till the year 1972, when public exposure and the resultant shocked reaction forced the closing of the experiment, many decades too late.
How is it that doctors originally pledged to help save lives and heal patients ended up doing the opposite? There is little question that racism was part of the picture, as well as grandiose ideas about the value of the research. Treating those patients effectively would have ended many years of work on this experiment. But there is absolutely no question that it should have been ended back in the 1940s, as soon as penicillin became known as a cure. Perhaps, indeed, the experiment never should have begun.
But the story is also an example of the way facts get twisted as time goes on and rumors fly. If one believes that the Tuskegee researchers knowingly and purposely infected these men with syphilis, and that they did so with remarkable callousness because the men were black, then it’s much less of a stretch to believe, as Jeremiah Wright appears to, that the US government invented AIDS to harm people of color.
Rumors and conspiracy theories tend to grow in such fertile field. The truth of Tuskegee is bad enough; no need for lies to make it even worse.
