The Study That Stole Treatment

This episode tells the dark history of the Tuskegee untreated syphilis study, a forty-year medical study that began in 1932 and ended only after public exposure in 1972. Six hundred Black men in Alabama were enrolled, and informed consent was not collected; many were left untreated while researchers observed the disease. In under three minutes, the episode asks how medicine becomes dangerous when trust is taken from people who were never told the truth.