Congressional intervention eventually led to the publication of the Belmont Report in 1979, which is now required reading for everyone involved in human subject research. The Belmont Report identifies three basic ethical principles regarding all human subject research: respect for persons, beneficence, and justice. Show
Obviously, researchers in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study violated all three of these principles, as participants were lied to about their condition, lied to about the treatment they were receiving, and selected based on race, gender, and economic class. The few survivors of the study received a formal apology from President Bill Clinton in 1997. Description This is one of six cases from Michael Pritchard and Theodore Golding's instructor guide, "Ethics in the Science Classroom." that provide background and some discussion guidelines around the historical Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Categories Illustrated by This Case: Issues related to experimentation on human subjects. Body 1. IntroductionAlthough experimentation on human subjects has long been understood to be fraught with serious ethical concerns, little was done to develop national and international guidelines and regulations with regard to such research until the end of World War II. Populations that were frequently victimized by involuntary or coerced participation in potentially dangerous experiments included prisoners and insane asylum inmates. Due to popular recognition of the need to test new medical treatments, defenders of the rights of such powerless individuals found little political interest in outlawing these practices. However, the atrocities committed by Nazi doctors in the name of medical experimentation, as revealed during the Nuremberg war crimes trials, raised international consciousness about the need for an acceptable code for medical research. The result was the promulgation in 1947 of the Nuremberg Code. This document was drafted by an international panel of experts on medical research, human rights, and ethics. It focused on the requirement for voluntary consent of the human subject and the weighing of the anticipated potential humanitarian benefits of a proposed experiment against the risks to the participant. The Code served as the initial model for those few public and private research and professional organizations that voluntary chose to adopt guidelines or rules for research involving human subjects. In the ensuing years occasional media publicity called attention to continuing questionable biomedical and behavioral research practices. In 1972 the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, described in the case study below, became a cause celebre due to the thorough and dramatic Associate Press story written by reporter Jean Heller. Congressional hearings took place in 1973 and the following year Congress passed legislation creating the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The Commissioners included prominent experts and scholars in the fields of medicine, psychology, civil rights, the law, ethics and religion. In 1979 they published Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research, which is commonly referred to as "The Belmont Report." This document presents a well-developed ethical framework for the exploration of the issues associated with the use of human beings as the subjects of research. More comprehensive than the Nuremberg Code, it defined the boundary between accepted therapeutic practice and experimental research, and proposed the following three basic principles to guide in the evaluation of the ethics of research involving human subjects.
The Belmont report has greatly influenced the codes and regulations regarding human subjects research that have since been established in the United States by federal and many state governments, universities, professional organizations and by private research institutions, as well as similar codes and regulations elsewhere in the world. 2. BackgroundSyphilis was a widespread but poorly-understood disease until shortly after the turn of the century. Two of the principal steps forward were the isolation of the bacterium associated with syphilis in 1905, and shortly thereafter, the development of the Wasserman reaction to detect the presence of syphilis through a blood test. Still, much about the disease and its progress remained unknown. Due to this lack of understanding many cases were incorrectly diagnosed as syphilis, while in other cases patients who would now be recognized as victims of the disease were missed. As the etiology of the disease was better understood, it became increasingly urgent to understand its long-term effects. The early treatments that predated the discovery of penicillin involving the use of such poisons as arsenic and mercury were dangerous, and sometimes even fatal. Thus, it was vital to learn about the likelihood that the disease itself would result in serious physical or mental disability in order to make sure that the potential benefits of treatment exceeded the risks. One long-term study had been carried out in Oslo, Norway. This had been a retrospective study, going over the past case histories of syphilis victims then undergoing treatment, and had been undertaken on an exclusively white population. In the early 1930s, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) began a program aimed at controlling venereal disease in the rural South. The Julius Rosenwald Fund - a philanthropic organization that was interested in promoting the welfare of African-Americans, provided the funds for a two-year demonstration study in Macon County, Alabama where 82% of the residents were African-Americans, most of whom lived in poverty and had never seen a doctor. A principal aim of this study was to determine the incidence of the disease in the local population, while training both white and African-American physicians and nurses in its treatment. When the results revealed that 36% of the Macon County African-Americans had syphilis, which was far higher than the national rate, the Rosenwald Fund, concerned about the racial implications of this finding, refused requests to support a follow-up project. The discovery of the fact that the incidence of the disease was higher among African-Americans than among whites was attributed by some to social and economic factors, but by others to a possible difference in susceptibility between whites and non-whites. Indeed one Public Health Service consultant, Dr Joseph E. Moore of Johns Hopkins University School of medicine proposed that "Syphilis in the negro is in many respects a different disease from syphilis in whites." 3. The CaseIn 1932 the PHS decided to proceed with a follow-up study in Macon County. Unlike the project supported by the Rosenwald Fund, the specific goal of the new study was to examine the progression of untreated syphilis in Afro-Americans. Permission was obtained for the use of the excellent medical facilities at the teaching hospital of the Tuskegee Institute and human subjects were recruited by spreading the word among Black people in the county that volunteers would be given free tests for "bad blood," a term used locally to refer to a wide variety of ailments. Thus began what evolved into "The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male," a project that would continue for forty years. The subject group was composed of 616 Afro-American men, 412 of whom had been diagnosed as having syphilis, and 204 controls. The participants were never explained the true nature of the study. Not only were the syphilitics among them not treated for the disease -- a key aspect of the study design that was retained even after 1943 when penicillin became available as a safe, highly effective cure -- but those few who recognized their condition and attempted to seek help from PHS syphilis treament clinics were prevented from doing so. Eunice Rivers, an Afro-American PHS nurse assigned to monitor the study, soon became a highly trusted authority figure within the subject community. She was largely responsible for assuring the cooperation of the participants throughout the duration of the study. She was aware of the goals and requirements of the study, including the failure to fully inform the participants of their condition and to deny treatment for syphilis. It was her firm conviction that the men in the study were better off because they received superior medical care for ailments other than syphilis than the vast majority of Afro-Americans in Macon County. The nature of the Study was certainly not withheld from the nation's medical community. Many venereal disease experts were specifically contacted for advice and opinions. Most of them expressed support for the project. In 1965, 33 years after the Study's initiation, Dr. Irwin Schatz became the first medical professional to formally object to the Study on moral grounds. The PHS simply ignored his complaint. The following year, Peter Buxtin, a venereal disease investigator for the PHS began a prolonged questioning of the morality of the Study. A panel of prominent physicians was convened by the PHS in 1969 to review the Tuskegee study. The panel included neither Afro-Americans nor medical ethicists. Ignoring the fact that it clearly violated the human experimentation guidelines adopted by the PHS in 1966, the panel's recommendation that the Study continue without significant modification was accepted. By 1972, Buxtin had resigned from the PHS and entered law school. Still bothered by the failure of the agency to take his objections seriously, he contacted the Associated Press, which assigned reporter Jean Heller to the story. On July 25, 1972 the results of her journalist investigation of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male were published. The response to Heller's revelations was broad-based public outrage, which finally brought the Study to an immediate end. 4. Readings and ResourcesA good, detailed case study of the Tuskegee Syphilis Project, with background material and suggestions about teaching the case, written for undergraduate college students is:
An excellent dramatization of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study story, available as a 60-minute video recording is:
For a medical report on the Study summarizing the first thirty years of subject observation see:
Recent books about the Tuskegee Study include:
For more information on the ethics of experimentation on human subjects read:
For a report on recent revelations concerning unethical experiments that exposed many human subjects to nuclear radiation see:
For an excellent treatment of the history of syphilis, which raises many other interesting questions about the nature of scientific research see:
5. The IssuesSignificant questions of ethics and values raised by this case:
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2055332. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. What were the ethical issues in the Tuskegee study?Evidently, the rights of the research subjects were violated. The Tuskegee Study raised a host of ethical issues such as informed consent, racism, paternalism, unfair subject selection in research, maleficence, truth-telling and justice, among others.
When did the Tuskegee study become unethical?Heller broke the story in July 1972, prompting public outrage and forcing the study to finally shut down. By that time, 28 participants had perished from syphilis, 100 more had passed away from related complications, at least 40 spouses had been diagnosed with it and the disease had been passed to 19 children at birth.
Which ethical principle was violated by the Tuskegee Syphilis Study?Among the numerous codes of ethics that were breached during the Tuskegee study in 1932, the predominate ethical violation was the voluntary informed consent. The rationale of voluntary informed consent is an essential ethical requirement in biomedical research involving human experiment.
Why was the Tuskegee syphilis study unethical quizlet?7: Why was the Tuskegee Study considered unethical? A. Those conducting the study did not provide treatment for participants even after an effective treatment became available.
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