Class Videos (Unit: 1, 2 & 3 videos Youtube, Unseen Life on Earth) 8/22/22

MORALITY video: Bad Blood: Deadly Deception: Morality Video (Click here) Syphilis Exp AL

Videos: Unseen Life on Earth

Each Unit has several videos from the Unseen Life on Earth series... see your instructor for those pertaining to your current Unit.

Unit 1: Microbial Interactions
Unit 2:  Microbiol Evolution (Ch 9), Metabolism (Ch 5), Reading the Code of Life (Ch 5 & 7 Mutation & enz control); Microbial Diversity (Ch 7 mutation and adaptation), Genetic Control (Ch 8 and 9 taxonomy and advanced DNA ch 8)
Unit 3: *Microbes and Human Diseases (SW Pul Vir Sydrome), Microbial Control (Ch 13); Microbial Interactions; Human Defenses (Ch 16-18); Microbes and Human Diseases

Microbial Evolution Ch9 Useen Life on Earth series

Utube Playlist on Class Topics Midterm Unit 2

For Unit 2: The Midterm/Lab Practical 2 Exam  Please go to the Playlist for Unit 2 - depending on the time we have for lecture, you will see some of these in class (if your class had extra time for the MIDTERM, you may have these as assigned  as "AT HOME" videos.

Unit 3: Viruses, Viroids, Prions and Eukaryotic Parasites

The videos assigned for this Unit (which WILL BE ON THE EVALUATIONS) are:  *The Brain Eaters; *Herpes: The Elusive Invader; *Microbes and Human Diseases (a history of SW Pulmonary Virus Syndrome found under the series Unseen Life on Earth - above); *Emerging Viruses;  *The War on HIV; *AIDSVAX (60 Minutes II episode); *Conquest of the Parasites, Parasites: Eating Us Alive; *Sleeping Sickness:  A Cure NOT USED

FOR HIV/AIDS: Patient "0" (CLICK HERE)

WHY we have Global Viral Outbreaks (TED conf) Click Here

AND the BAND PLAYED ON (CLICK HERE FOR THE VIDEO LINK) 

 "AND THE BAND PLAYED ON" (Click here to temp download to view) 

*VERY IMPORTANT VIDEOS with significant questions on your evaluations

 NOVA videos for the MT & FINAL exam.
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Link to the NOVA series video: "Origins: Back to the Beginning" (not required but recommended; always click on the yellow area to view the link) 


Link to the NOVA series video: "Origins: How Life Began" (click on the yellow area to view the link) please complete the How Life Began video worksheet while viewing this video. The worksheet will be on the PQ and MT evaluations.

NOTE:  For Chapter 9 Taxonomy you need to view the NOVA Origins series 2nd video "How Life Began" and do the worksheet.

It will help you immensely to first view the first Origins video "Back to the Beginning" before viewing the second... but it is NOT required.

ESSENTIAL FOR UNIT 3 - watch this video!!! WATCH CONQUEST of the PARASTIES (5 Great Neglected Diseases of Mankind) Click here

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INTRODUCTORY NOTES  

Videos/worksheets: "Morality in Science" the required worksheets (2) & videos (3) are: "Deadly Deception" (Worksheet 1 - see link below article after this paragraph) and "War on the Weak" + "Eugenics Movement Part 2" (Worksheet 2) which is found in the YOUTUBE Playlist button on Class Topics above...
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ORIGINS VIDEOS for Chapters 9 and 4: 

Back to the Beginning (Click HERE):

How Life Began video (Click HERE):  Worksheet (Click HERE):

Unseen Life on Earth: Microbial Evolution  (Click HERE) & Metabolism (Click HERE):

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The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

The U.S. government's 40-year experiment on black men with syphilis

by Borgna Brunner

Related Links: Black History Month Features U.S. Public Health Service Tuskegee National Historic Site Tuskegee University (formerly the Tuskegee Institute) Internet Resources on the Tuskegee Study Clinton's Apology for the Experiment Taliaferro Clark, Head of the U.S. Public Health Service at the outset of the experiment.

"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... clearly racist." —President Clinton's apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to the eight remaining survivors, May 16, 1997

For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,” their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all.

The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”

Using Human Beings as Laboratory Animals

The true nature of the experiment had to be kept from the subjects to ensure their cooperation. The sharecroppers' grossly disadvantaged lot in life made them easy to manipulate. Pleased at the prospect of free medical care—almost none of them had ever seen a doctor before—these unsophisticated and trusting men became the pawns in what James Jones, author of the excellent history on the subject, Bad Blood, identified as “the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history.”

The study was meant to discover how syphilis affected blacks as opposed to whites—the theory being that whites experienced more neurological complications from syphilis, whereas blacks were more susceptible to cardiovascular damage. How this knowledge would have changed clinical treatment of syphilis is uncertain.

Although the PHS touted the study as one of great scientific merit, from the outset its actual benefits were hazy. It took almost forty years before someone involved in the study took a hard and honest look at the end results, reporting that “nothing learned will prevent, find, or cure a single case of infectious syphilis or bring us closer to our basic mission of controlling venereal disease in the United States.”

When the experiment was brought to the attention of the media in 1972, news anchor Harry Reasoner described it as an experiment that “used human beings as laboratory animals in a long and inefficient study of how long it takes syphilis to kill someone.”

A Heavy Price in the Name of Bad Science

To ensure that the men would show up for a painful and potentially dangerous spinal tap, the PHS doctors misled them with a letter full of promotional hype: “Last Chance for Special Free Treatment.” The fact that autopsies would eventually be required was also concealed.

By the end of the experiment, 28 of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis. How had these men been induced to endure a fatal disease in the name of science?

To persuade the community to support the experiment, one of the original doctors admitted it “was necessary to carry on this study under the guise of a demonstration and provide treatment.” At first, the men were prescribed the syphilis remedies of the day—bismuth, neoarsphenamine, and mercury— but in such small amounts that only 3 percent showed any improvement.

These token doses of medicine were good public relations and did not interfere with the true aims of the study. Eventually, all syphilis treatment was replaced with “pink medicine”—aspirin.

To ensure that the men would show up for a painful and potentially dangerous spinal tap, the PHS doctors misled them with a letter full of promotional hype: “Last Chance for Special Free Treatment.” The fact that autopsies would eventually be required was also concealed.

As a doctor explained, “If the colored population becomes aware that accepting free hospital care means a post-mortem, every darky will leave Macon County...” Even the Surgeon General of the United States participated in enticing the men to remain in the experiment, sending them certificates of appreciation after 25 years in the study.

Following Doctors' Orders

It takes little imagination to ascribe racist attitudes to the white government officials who ran the experiment, but what can one make of the numerous African Americans who collaborated with them? The experiment's name comes from the Tuskegee Institute, the black university founded by Booker T. Washington. Its affiliated hospital lent the PHS its medical facilities for the study, and other predominantly black institutions as well as local black doctors also participated. A black nurse, Eunice Rivers, was a central figure in the experiment for most of its forty years.

The Veterans' Administration Hospital in Tuskegee, Alabama. Some of the study's post-mortem exams were conducted here.

The promise of recognition by a prestigious government agency may have obscured the troubling aspects of the study for some. A Tuskegee doctor, for example, praised “the educational advantages offered our interns and nurses as well as the added standing it will give the hospital.” Nurse Rivers explained her role as one of passive obedience: “we were taught that we never diagnosed, we never prescribed; we followed the doctor's instructions!”

It is clear that the men in the experiment trusted her and that she sincerely cared about their well-being, but her unquestioning submission to authority eclipsed her moral judgment. Even after the experiment was exposed to public scrutiny, she genuinely felt nothing ethical had been amiss.

One of the most chilling aspects of the experiment was how zealously the PHS kept these men from receiving treatment. When several nationwide campaigns to eradicate venereal disease came to Macon County, the men were prevented from participating. Even when penicillin—the first real cure for syphilis—was discovered in the 1940s, the Tuskegee men were deliberately denied the medication.

During World War II, 250 of the men registered for the draft and were consequently ordered to get treatment for syphilis, only to have the PHS exempt them. Pleased at their success, the PHS representative announced: “So far, we are keeping the known positive patients from getting treatment.” The experiment continued in spite of the Henderson Act (1943), a public health law requiring testing and treatment for venereal disease, and in spite of the World Health Organization's Declaration of Helsinki (1964), which specified that “informed consent” was needed for experiments involving human beings.

Blowing the Whistle

The PHS did not accept the media's comparison of Tuskegee with the experiments performed by Nazi doctors on Jewish victims during World War II. Yet the PHS offered the same defense offered at the Nuremberg trials — they were just carrying out orders.

The story finally broke in the Washington Star on July 25, 1972, in an article by Jean Heller of the Associated Press. Her source was Peter Buxtun, a former PHS venereal disease interviewer and one of the few whistle blowers over the years. The PHS, however, remained unrepentant, claiming the men had been “volunteers” and “were always happy to see the doctors,” and an Alabama state health officer who had been involved claimed “somebody is trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.”

Under the glare of publicity, the government ended their experiment, and for the first time provided the men with effective medical treatment for syphilis. Fred Gray, a lawyer who had previously defended Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, filed a class action suit that provided a $10 million out-of-court settlement for the men and their families. Gray, however, named only whites and white organizations as defendants in the suit, portraying Tuskegee as a black and white case when it was in fact more complex than that—black doctors and institutions had been involved from beginning to end.

The PHS did not accept the media's comparison of Tuskegee with the appalling experiments performed by Nazi doctors on their Jewish victims during World War II. Yet in addition to the medical and racist parallels, the PHS offered the same morally bankrupt defense offered at the Nuremberg trials: they claimed they were just carrying out orders, mere cogs in the wheel of the PHS bureaucracy, exempt from personal responsibility.

The study's other justification—for the greater good of science—is equally spurious. Scientific protocol had been shoddy from the start. Since the men had in fact received some medication for syphilis in the beginning of the study, however inadequate, it thereby corrupted the outcome of a study of “untreated syphilis.”

The Legacy of Tuskegee

In 1990, a survey found that 10 percent of African Americans believed that the U.S. government created AIDS as a plot to exterminate blacks, and another 20 percent could not rule out the possibility that this might be true. As preposterous and paranoid as this may sound, at one time the Tuskegee experiment must have seemed equally farfetched.

Who could imagine the government, all the way up to the Surgeon General of the United States, deliberately allowing a group of its citizens to die from a terrible disease for the sake of an ill-conceived experiment? In light of this and many other shameful episodes in our history, African Americans' widespread mistrust of the government and white society in general should not be a surprise to anyone.

1. All quotations in the article are from Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, James H. Jones, expanded edition (New York: Free Press, 1993).

More Black History Month features

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Read more: Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmtuskegee1.html#ixzz2O7NcJRYe

The Deadly Deception - Syphilis Video for Test

The Tuskegee syphilis experiment (also known as the Tuskegee syphilis study or Public Health Service syphilis study) was an infamous clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis in poor, rural black men who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government... The Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began the study in 1932. Investigators enrolled in the study a total of 600 impoverished, African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama; 399 who had previously contracted syphilis before the study began, and 201 without the disease. 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. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for "bad blood," a local term used to describe several illnesses, including syphilis, anemia and fatigue...

OCTOBER 1, 2010

MORE like the Tuskegee experiment - BAD SCIENCE remix: The USPHS Syphilis tests in Guatemala

Today's Washington Post storyabout syphilis testing on Guatemalans during the 1940s recalls another dark chapter in medical history: the Tuskegee experiment, in which some black men were intentionally denied treatment so the disease's impact could be studied.

If you missed the startling tale about Guatemala, which was uncovered by a Wellesley College professor, take a minute to read it. Basically, doctors used prostitutes and other means to infect soldiers, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis. The United States apologized today for the incident, which involved the U.S. Public Health Service and the National Institutes of Health.

Then recall that while the Guatemala experiment was conducted from 1946-1948, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (shown here) lasted for decades and did not end until it was exposed by the media in 1972. What's more, Tuskegee subjects were denied treatment, while the Guatemalans were treated after being infected. If these facts don't shock you, you are unshockable.

Several books on the Tuskegee experiment are available if you want to read more. Among them: "Bad Blood" by James H. Jones, "Medical Apartheid" by Harriet A. Washington, and "Examining Tuskegee" by Susan M. Reverby.