Clinton's Apology

The tusksegee study was a study done by the public health service of the United States.  It was to study the natural history of syphilis in males.  It was racist and very unethical.  The men of the study were all poor black sharecroppers.  They were not informed of what the government was doing.  They were thought that the government had them in a program to help them with free clinics and things of that sort.  The men that had syphilis were studied until death.  Penicillin was found early in the study but the men did not receive treatment even though it was available.  The last from the early thirties to until 1971 when the story broke out.

Former President Clinton made an official apology in 1997.  It was done at the white house in a public event.  Some of the survivors and their family was there for the event.  Clinton talked about the study and gave a fairly good apology.  He then went into some goals of getting the trust of the African American community and making sure that a incident such as the this one would never happen again.

Some of the steps for the goals was the apology, grant money for Tuskegee to make a center for bioethics and health care, and by increasing regulations on medical research.

This apology is a good step for the government to reach out to the African American community.  It shows that the government admits to being at fault which is good.  In the video we saw in class, some of the doctors and people involved in running the study didn't see anything wrong with the study after so many years.  This so bad because the study was so racist and unethical.

The topic of the presidency brings me to the inauguration of Obama. I think it will have a big impact on the African American community.  I believe that there will be more trust in the system of our government seeing that the president of the United States is African American.  People we'll see that it is possible to for any person of any walk of life can achieve great things in this country if only one tries.