New York fund apologizes for role in Tuskegee syphilis study
By Jay Reeves,
The Associated Press
| 06. 11. 2022
Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash
For almost 40 years starting in the 1930s, as government researchers purposely let hundreds of Black men die of syphilis in Alabama so they could study the disease, a foundation in New York covered funeral expenses for the deceased. The payments were vital to survivors of the victims in a time and place ravaged by poverty and racism.
Altruistic as they might sound, the checks — $100 at most — were no simple act of charity: They were part of an almost unimaginable scheme. To get the money, widows or other loved ones had to consent to letting doctors slice open the bodies of the dead men for autopsies that would detail the ravages of a disease the victims were told was “bad blood.”
Fifty years after the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study was revealed to the public and halted, the organization that made those funeral payments, the Milbank Memorial Fund, publicly apologized Saturday to descendants of the study's victims. The move is rooted in America's racial reckoning after George Floyd's murder by police in...
Related Articles
By Joy Zhang, Progress Educational Trust | 08.12.2024
What do China's new ethical guidlines tell us about the country's changing attitude to human genome editing? Professor Joy Zhang reads between the lines...
Recently, China's National Science and Technology Ethics Committee introduced a new set of ethics guidelines on...
By Alcott Wei, South China Morning Post | 07.13.2024
China has banned all clinical research involving germline genome editing under a newly released ethics guideline.
Germline gene engineering relates to altering the DNA in sperm, eggs or early embryos to introduce changes that can be inherited.
“Any clinical research...
By Staff, Japan Times | 07.10.2024
Photo by Roméo A. on Unsplash
How did Japanese society, which was supposed to have transformed into a democracy after World War II, justify discrimination against people with disabilities and openly endorse eugenics?
This is a key question people may...
By Rachel Clayton, ABC News | 07.08.2024
In her early 30s, Michelle Galea wasn't convinced motherhood was for her.
"I didn't know if I wanted a child or if society was telling me I should have a child right now," she said.
But as she watched two...