Paron Hall
Parran, who served as the first dean of Pitt’s School of Public Health from 1948 to 1958, was involved in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study while serving as U.S. Surgeon General from 1936 to 1948. He was also involved in a government-sponsored study that infected prisoners and mental institution patients with venereal disease in Guatemala. The Tuskegee, Alabama, study withheld information and treatment from 399 black males with syphilis so researchers could observe the progress of the disease. Over the course of the 40-year study, 28 men died from syphilis, 40 spouses were infected, and 19 children were born with a congenital form of the disease. As far back as the mid-1800s, populations that were devalued in American society — racial minorities, people with disabilities and mental illness, orphans, prisoners, the elderly – became unconsenting subjects of scientific experiments. Documentation of experiments on African slaves dates to the 1840s. [1]
Before the discovery of penicillin as a treatment, syphilis was deadly. Yet hundreds of black men served as test subjects in a 40-year experiment for which Parran served as the clear inspiration, Dober said. In that period, researchers failed to give them new treatment and did not inform them that the goal of the study was to catalogue the harms of untreated syphilis on human subjects. [2]