Here's another one for you: this professor argues that the real purpose of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male was not to deny treatment to Black men, nor to study the progress of the disease, but to harvest serum for research:
"The Treponema pallidum, as one of its features, has extreme fragility. It could not really be cultivated in the laboratory at this time. So, there was an alternative, the experimenters thought, and that was a simple one: to keep a ready supply of serum available through regular blood samples from untreated syphilitic subjects. I started to say patients, but the point is they aren’t patients. They weren’t to be treated, they were subjects. And indeed, in the course of the Tuskegee study itself, two new reliable tests were developed using Tuskegee blood, and they were successfully marketed. These two tests were the venereal disease research laboratory test — was one — and the other was called “the fluorescent treponemal antibody absorption test.” And needless to say, the subjects of this experiment were never paid for this particular service that they rendered to science."
