The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was "arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history". In a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, by the U.S. Public Health Service, Investigators recruited 399 poor African-American sharecroppers with syphilis to research the progression of the untreated disease. The patients were lied to from the start, being told that a dangerous non-theraputic spinal tap was a "treatment". When an effective cure for the disease, penicillin, became standard in the 1940s, they were actively prevented from getting it, again being lied to and being given placebos instead. The study required all participants to undergo an autopsy after death—in order to receive funeral benefits.
A few public health workers opposed the project but the CDC (who had taken it over), rallied support from the medical establishment. Finally in the early 1970s a venereal disease investigator, Peter Buxtun went to the press, resulting in the end of the program.
In 1997, President Bill Clinton said, "What was done cannot be undone. But we can end the silence. We can stop turning our heads away. We can look at you in the eye and finally say on behalf of the American people, what the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry ... To our African American citizens, I am sorry that your federal government orchestrated a study so clearly racist."
The experiment continues to produce distrust of public health measures among black people in the US and has inspired some conspiracy theories regarding AIDS.