The benefits of the study were that it aimed at discovering the treatment for deadly syphilis that had struck a given part of the population. Through this experiment, a permanent treatment was to be revealed. The target population for the study was the African Americans and the low-income earners who had the problem of syphilis.
The motives of the subjects in the study were to get treatment for the illnesses they were undergoing. While they were told that they were to receive treatment for bad blood, some thought that they were going to get treatment for bad stomachs. The Tuskegee staff, on the other hand, had the motive of getting to understand the cure for syphilis.
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The kind of criticism in the study is that the staff acted unethically by providing false information to the subjects about the study. The subjects were told that they were going to be treated for bad stomach when in a real sense it was a test for syphilis ( Fourtner, Fourtner & Freeman , 2013). This is the unethical code of conducts within scientific research. The researchers could have told the subjects the exact motive for the study. The unethical conduct also led to the cessation of the study after it lasted for forty years when it had initially been projected for two weeks.
It is not easy to conduct the same study today due to increased concern within the scientific field over the need to act ethically. The ethical code of conduct within the research field requires that the researchers inform the subjects about the purpose of the study before they are involved. While this was not a serious concern during the Tuskegee study, it has currently become a point of concern amongst scientists thus conducting a similar study without the consent of the subjects could be difficult.
Reference
Fourtner, A. W., Fourtner, C. R., & Freeman Herreid, C. (2013). Bad blood-A case study of the Tuskegee syphilis project. Journal of College Science Teaching , 23 , 277-277.
