8. Twenty-eight black men died of (treatable) syphilis in the name of science.
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male was a Public Health Service study that began in 1932 and recruited 600 poor black men from Alabama as its subjects. The men were told they’d receive treatment for “bad blood”—a colloquialism for syphilis, anemia, and fatigue—but they were actually misled.
Researchers continued the experiment even after penicillin was proven to treat syphilis in 1945. The research finally stopped in 1972, after The New York Times published a story about the study tilted “Syphilis Victims in U.S. Study Went Untreated for 40 Years.” Over those four decades, 28 men died of syphilis and 100 more died from related causes.
