Lessons from the Tuskegee experiment, 50 years after unethical study uncovered

This year marks 50 years since it came to light that the nation's leading public health agency, the Public Health Service, conceived an unethical "research study"—the Tuskegee Experiment—that lasted for 40 years. The participants? Black men in a rural community in the South who existed in a state of quasi-slavery, making them extremely vulnerable and the agency's treatment of them that much more sickening.