2023 Black History Month Event

Watch the video recording on our YouTube channel.

Last fall, the Harvard Steering Committee on Human Remains in University Museum Collections issued a report regarding the procurement, provenance, preservation, and disposition of human remains in Harvard museums and collections, including those of at least 19 individuals who were or who may have been enslaved. In celebration of Black History Month, Professor Evelynn Hammonds, the committee chair, led a seminar discussion among several of the committee members about the committee, its deliberations, and its conclusions.

This seminar was hosted by the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics, the Harvard Medical School Office for Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Partnership, and the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care at Tuskegee University.

Committee Chair:

• Evelynn M. Hammonds, BEE, SM, PhD
  Barbara Gutmann Rosenkrantz Professor of the History of Science
  Professor of African & African American Studies, and Professor in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Committee Members:

• Scott Harris Podolsky, MD
  Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine
  Director, Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Medical Library
  Primary Care Physician, Massachusetts General Hospital
• Philip J. Deloria
  Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Harvard University
• Dominic W. Hall, MA, ALM
  Curator, Warren Anatomical Museum
• Jane Pickering, MA, MS
  William & Muriel Seabury Howells Director, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology

Moderator:

• Robert D. Truog, MD, MA
  Director, Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics
  Frances Glessner Lee Professor of Legal Medicine
  Professor of Anaesthesia (Pediatrics), Harvard Medical School

The USPHS Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male at Tuskegee and Macon County began in 1932, after US Public Health Service doctors recorded a 39.8% prevalence of syphilis among patients seen in Macon County, Alabama during a treatment study in one corner of the county. While these data might have raised many possible research questions, USPHS doctors chose to focus on the natural history of untreated syphilis.

They not only denied participants the treatments available in the 1930’s; they also chose to continue to study untreated syphilis long after highly-effective, inexpensive, and extraordinarily safe treatment with penicillin became widely available. While the research methods they used are now universally condemned, far less attention has been given to more fundamental questions about the ethics of research, including:

What should the goals of research even be? Who should decide those? What are the most crucial ethical characteristics of relationships between investigators and research subjects?

Introductory Remarks:

• Carmen J. Thornton, MPH, MCHES
  Director of Research, Development, and Workforce, American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
  Consultant, Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation
  Granddaughter of Fred Tyson, subject in USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee

Presenters:

• Susan M. Reverby, PhD
  Marion Butler McLean Professor Emerita in the History of Ideas
  Professor Emerita of Women's and Gender Studies, Wellesley College
  Author of Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy
• Jesse Milan, Jr., JD
  President and CEO, AIDS United
• Wangui Muigai, PhD
  Assistant Professor, Brandeis University
  Greenwall Faculty Scholar, class of 2025

Moderator:

• Lachlan Forrow, MD
  Director, Ethics & Palliative Care Program, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
  Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine, Part-time, Harvard Medical School
  President, The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship

Commentator:

• David Augustin Hodge, Sr., DMin, PhD
  Associate Director of Education and Associate Professor, National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care, Tuskegee University

Support provided by the Oswald DeN. Cammann Fund at Harvard University.