Assignment

The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was an infamous clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African American men who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government. For participating in the study, the men were given free medical care, meals, and free burial insurance. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. Revelation of study failures by a whistleblower led to major changes in U.S. law and regulation on the protection of participants in clinical studies.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, cited as "arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history," led to the 1979 Belmont Report and the establishment of the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP). It also led to federal laws and regulations requiring Institutional Review Boards for the protection of human subjects in studies involving human subjects.

Sadly, despite the regulations that are in place to protect subjects, there are still instances of unethical conduct in human subject research today. Choose one of the examples below and gather information related to the original research and the nature of the ethical controversy. Report your findings, in your own words, citing examples from your literature search. Use what you have learned about research ethics to offer your opinion on the case and whether there were steps that could have been taken to avoid the controversy.

1. The Lead-Based Paint Abatement repair and Maintenance Study in Baltimore conducted by Johns Hopkins University's Kennedy Krieger Institute in the 1990s.

2. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) funded study by the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill dating back to 2004 examining the effects of inhaling diesel exhaust and particulates.