Lessons from the Tuskegee Study (Redux)

THE PAST IS NEVER PAST

What happens when medical science treats people as avatars of racial and other demographic groups, rather as individuals; when scientific information is shrouded in secrecy; when dissenting viewpoints are squelched?

The Tuskegee Experiment (formally, the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”) is “arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history.” But the biggest error one can make is to view this sordid tale as bygone history. It is, instead, a cautionary tale for our own time. Infamy is made of publicity and perception, not uniqueness, severity, or obsolescence. Human rights abuses in the name of science stretch back to ancient times, and Tuskegee was only one of a long list of contemporaneous outrages. Two common threads marked many of these abusive episodes: the scientists viewed people as collectives rather than as individuals, and information flows were purposefully constricted. Today, these intertwining threads are wrapped about our throats.

William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Fittingly, Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi shared the same race-haunted terrain as Tuskegee, Alabama. Faulkner wrote movingly of sharecroppers while the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) abused actual sharecroppers at Tuskegee. Then, as now, it is easy for experts to abuse those whom they sincerely wish to help.