I’ve heard about other government experiments on unwitting Americans, but the Tuskegee experiments are new to me. It seems that from 1932 to 1972, the US Public Health Service conducted ongoing experiments on a group of illiterate African-American sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties of Alabama. The aim of the experiments was basically to see how long it would take the men to die from syphilis, and the degenerative effects it would have along the way.

Some 400 men were involved in the experiment and were persuaded to take part by offering them free health care. An article on it states:

The study was meant to discover how syphilis affected blacks as opposed to whites — the theory being that whites experienced more neurological complications from syphilis whereas blacks were more susceptible to cardiovascular damage. How this knowledge would have changed clinical treatment of syphilis is uncertain.

Wikipedia’s entry also adds:

The study was originally started as a study on the effectiveness of contemporary treatments (including Salvarsan, mercurial ointments and bismuth) which were considered harmful and ineffective, and an attempt to show that non-treatment was less harmful. By 1947, penicillin had been recognized as a safe and effective treatment for syphilis, yet the remaining members of the Tuskegee group of patients were allowed to sicken and die for another twenty-five years, and some were even actively blocked from effective treatments to allow scientists to study syphilis damage post mortem to better understand how the disease spreads and kills.

The funerary bills for the men was picked up by the government so that they could perform autopsies to study the long-term effects of the disease. Supposedly the Surgeon General of the US even sent the men certificates of appreciation for 25 years of participation in the study.

Of course, it wasn’t just the men who were affected, but their families as well:

By the end of the experiment, 28 of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis.

The studies came to an end in 1972 when the “research” was leaked to a newspaper reporter who blew the whistle on it. It’s shit like this that makes trusting the government completely fucking laughable.

1. Also spend a few moments at the Department of Energy’s friendly website which gives all kinds of nifty info about all the Human Radiation Experiments the government conducted on unwitting citizens. Hot stuff!
2. For more far-out (ie, not provable, like everything above) type of fun in this direction, check out some of the theories about how AIDS was invented to control population.