The Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Fred Gray

      

       Foreword

      When President Clinton, in a ceremony at the White House on May 16, 1997, addressed five elderly African American men—ages 89 to 109—and the family members of others who could not be present, he brought a symbolic resolution to one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. medical history.

      The President of the United States looked these men in the eyes and said:

      The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . The American people are sorry—for the loss, for the years of hurt. You did nothing wrong, but you were grievously wronged. I apologize and I am sorry that this apology has been so long in coming.

      As attorney for the participants in what became known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, I was deeply moved. Yes, in one sense it was true what the critics were saying, that the President’s apology was “too little and too late.” Yet for these surviving men and family members, and for the conscience of the nation, it could never be too late to make amends for a terrible injustice. When someone hurts you, their telling you that they are sorry for what they did is a healing act. This is no less true when it is your government that has committed the wrong. World history teaches us that governments rarely admit moral culpability for their wrongful actions.

      And what had the United States government done that was so wrong? Put in its simplest terms, the government used 623 men as human guinea pigs in a misguided forty-year medical experiment. That in itself would have been bad enough. The moral and ethical injury was compounded by the fact that all of these men were African American, predominantly poor and uneducated, and were deliberately kept in the dark about what was happening to them.

      It is pointless to try to weigh one person’s suffering against another’s, and I am not for a moment equating the Tuskegee Syphilis Study with the horrors committed in the name of “science” by Nazi doctors against Jews at Dachau and other places during World War II, but the principle is the same. The Nuremberg trials against Nazi war criminals resulted in a set of standards under which the civilized world agreed that human beings would not be used as research animals and that doctors would never forget that their first duty is to heal their patients. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study reiterates the necessity for commitment to these ideals.

      As an American citizen, it shames me to realize that the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which began in 1932, continued under the supervision of U.S. government officials and highly trained medical professionals until 1972, more than two decades after the Nuremberg trials.

      Thus, as I sat on the front row in the East Room of the White House on a warm May 16, 1997, I felt the President’s apology on behalf of the American people was a significant step in the right direction. Observing the ceremony, I reaffirmed my commitment to help ensure that the lessons of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study were widely known and that some lasting good will come out of the tragic situation.

      This