Steps still being taken to undo damage of America's Nuremberg

Abstract

The year 1947 was a watershed for medical ethics and medical care. Fifty years ago, the Nuremberg Code, created in response to the atrocities of Nazi medicine, called for the informed consent of participants in human research. That same year, penicillin was recognized as the standard of care for syphilis. Researchers from the U.S. Public Health Service failed to connect these two milestones. They continued to conduct a long-running study in Tuskegee, Alabama, on the course of syphilis in untreated African-American men and chose not to provide penicillin to study participants. Today, some researchers attribute problems in recruiting African Americans for clinical trials, at least in part, to the Tuskegee study.