The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment is about a scientific study that was done in the twentieth century for its unethical processes of conducting research. It is often the example of what lack of regulations and the cause of deception. Like many things, this experiment was a product of its time, as it only participants where African Americans because the researchers wanted to know the effects of syphilis on the African American population as they still thought that African Americans and White Americans were different. The experiment involved African American participants that were poor, illiterate, and suffered syphilis. They were told they would get a cure for their illness however, they were not told they had syphilis instead the researcher informed them that they had “bad blood” in order to inhibit their knowledge and prohibit them from receiving a cure. The people in the study were followed around for 40 years and their families, children, and lives were put at risk as throughout the entire study many participants had died and the rest were never given a cure. The people that had passed away left family behind that loved them but were also in a great financial struggle. In order for the researchers to do further study and analyze data, they offered the suffering families money as compensation for an empty burial and rights to study the body.
The people in this experiment were of lower class mainly labors as they were illiterate and lived in times of heavy racism. Their lack of social economic status left them exposed to manipulation because they lacked the money the researchers could give them. These people not only were of the lowest class but they never moved up the social ladder. Because they suffered from syphilis and were never given the cure they were promised many jobs were not available to them leaving them in the constant movement of horizontal social mobility. Their lack of income was not the only thing that left them at the bottom of the ladder. They lived in a time were segregation and heavy racism was very prominent. Even with the means to get a good job, they would have never climbed high enough the ladder. During the twentieth century the climb and vertical social mobility were relatively possible with hard work and education, but coming from a disadvantaged background and being African American made it nearly impossible for them to change anything about their lives. In this time the worry of being in the bottom of the ladder meant the upper class and their ideologies controlled the scientific field. In today’s society, we see that the upper class, the top 1 percent, control the political field of the country and heavily influence it. Back then it was nearly impossible to be a researcher of African American background and in today’s society, it is nearly impossible to run for office in government without a great deal of money and hailing from the upper class.
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