On this day, July 25, in 1972

The Washington Star exposed the story of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, a cruel medical study that the US Public Health Service had been conducting on 399 poor black men for the last 40 years. The men, who were in the late stages of Syphilis and lacked access to proper health care, were not in a position to deny this supposedly ‘free treatment’. They were never told that they had Syphilis, and were actually left untreated while slowly dying from the degenerative disease. The experiment had continued despite the World Health Organization’s 1964 declaration that “informed consent” was mandatory for experiments involving human beings.