Tuskegee Study Ethics

Clinical trials have been a boon to modern medicine by broadening the knowledge surrounding disease plaguing the human race and providing a tangible measure of the success and symptoms of treatments to combat these diseases. However each progression in science comes with unintended consequences, in the case of clinical trials it was corruption at the expense of the human volunteers. The Tuskegee Study, conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service and Tuskegee Institute in 1932, is an infamous example of clinical trials crossing the ethical line. However what is ethics? As noted by The Basics of Social Research by Earl Babbie, ethics are a social construction and subjective. Babbie then references Webster’s New World Dictionary stating that to avoid these ethical mistakes social scientists should follow the ethical guidelines set by their particular field of study. Social scientists as a general collective should follow the agreed upon ethics as laid out by our textbook: voluntary participation unless it is paramount to the study 's success, no harm to the participants, safeguarding study subject’s identity through anonymity and

Under the ethical guidelines set by our textbook, this study violated ethical guidelines. It violated the deception ethical standard by hiding the true intent of the study and instead tricked the subjects into believing they were being tested for “bad blood.” It violated the “no harm to participants” tenant because researchers went out of their way to ensure subjects were left unaware and untreated of their condition. Therefor it could also be argued that researchers also violated the “voluntary participation” standard because the subject’s participation was for "bad blood" not for this ulterior