The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is often paired with the horrific Nazi experiments as the prime examples of what happens when powerless subjects, the state's coercive power, racism, and medical research are unmoored from ethical concerns. In the Tuskegee study, over 400 African-American men with late stage syphilis were never told they were in a 40 year long (1932-72) experiment sponsored by the United States Public Health Service to study "untreated syphilis in the male Negro". The men were not directly offered treatment, even though they were told that the aspirins, tonics, and rubs were to help cure their "bad blood". With the support of community based physicians and nurses, the local standard of "no care" in Alabama's "black belt" became an orchestrated reality, even after penicillin became widely available in the late l940s. The medical uncertainty over how to treat late stage syphilis and the desire to hold on to the subjects . . . [Full text of this article]