EXPERIMENT IN TUSKEGEE: AN AMERICAN OUTRAGE: How the U.S. Government Perpetuated an Unlawful 40 year Eugenics Study on Over Six Hundred African Americans with Syphilis, the upcoming book by award-winning writer, Tina Andrews, will be released on the 50th Anniversary of the end of the infamous, heinous, and morally abhorrent Tuskegee Syphilis Study which from 1932 until 1972—experimented on 600 African American men from Macon County, Alabama. The men, 25 to 60 years old, were recruited to take part in a “scientific medical study.” The Study enlisted the men under the guise of providing free meals, free physicals, free burial insurance, and free medical care for “bad blood,” a colloquial term encompassing anemia, syphilis, and fatigue. Hundreds of poor, black men signed up.

 

What no one told them was that they would be participants in the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” a secret experiment conducted by government agency, the U.S. Public Health Service, to study the untreated progression of the deadly venereal disease. Told the treatment would only last six months, the men received physical examinations, x-rays, painful spinal taps, blood tests, and when they died, autopsies. But in fact, they never received any treatment at all. Not even after penicillin was discovered as a cure for syphilis.

 

In 1966, Peter Buxtun, a young public health service investigator, raised concerns about the study and wrote to the director of the U.S. division of venereal diseases about the ethics of the experiment. The agency ignored Buxtun, so, he leaked information about the study to Jean Heller, an Associated Press reporter. On July 26, 1972, Heller’s story appeared on the front page of the New York Times, revealing that the men had deliberately been left untreated for 40 years. That same year, Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy—famed U.S. Senate "Lion" and Kennedy Family patriarch—formed a Congressional Subcommittee Hearing on the Study, and at its conclusion ended the Tuskegee Experiment.

 

On May 16, 1997, President Bill Clinton issued an apology to the eight remaining black survivors of the experiment.

 

Andrews’ book relays the story in vivid detail. She chronicles the origins of the Study, the duplicitous and racist white doctors and the plight of the unwitting black men involved in the study. It also showcases the black nurse, Eunice Rivers, who aided and abetted without her complete knowledge. Andrews even interviews whistle-blower, Peter Buxtun, now in his 80’s.

 

No one was ever prosecuted for their role in sentencing 400 of the 600 black men in the Study to death from syphilis, and Andrews cites that many blame the Tuskegee Study for the unwillingness of black individuals to participate in medical research or take newly released medicine up to this day—the latest reluctance tied to receiving  vaccines for the Covid-19 pandemic today.  Coming January 2022.