Racist tests towards blacks in mid-20th century America

Racist tests towards blacks in mid-20th century America

 

 

I am currently reading Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book about the life of a black woman whose cancerous tissue created the first infinitely reproducing cells used for scientific research.  A lot of the book centers around the ethical issues in the case—neither Henrietta nor her family ever gave the doctors permission to harvest her cells in the first place, and despite going for $25 dollars a vial in the 1940’s, the Lacks family has never seen a dime for their mothers’ cells.

This kind of scientific racism—or perhaps more accurately in this case, socio-economic discrimination—was common during this time.  Henrietta, and other poor, usually black, people could not afford to pay for health care.  Instead, they would go to free wards.  At the wards, doctors commonly took their cells or other biological material without their knowledge because they felt that this type of material was payment for their services in lieu of actual money. 

Skloot mentions several other examples of scientific racism perpetrated against blacks around this same period.  The first was perpetrated for nearly 40 years, from 1932-1972, against black men with syphilis. Crafted by the U.S. Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Alabama, the study was originally intended to find a cure for the disease, but part of researchers also wanted to track the disease from its beginning to ending stages. So, the men were diagnosed with syphilis, but were not told about their illness.  Even when researchers found the cure for syphilis, these men were allowed to die, and their families were never told that there was cure to their relatives’ disease.  Nearly 400 black sharecroppers died in this study.

Skloot also mentions the case of Mississippi Appendectomies, which were actually hysterectomies performed on black women so they would stop having children and so that young doctors could gain experience performing the procedure. 

This was not an isolated occurrence.  Throughout the 1930’s to the 1970’s, the government tried to limit blacks’ reproductive freedom in under the heading of family planning.  In 1939, the Birth Control Association of America created the “Negro Project,” which aimed to limit the number of black children a family could have.  The Association said that blacks bred without consideration and beyond their monetary means. They also said that African Americans were the least mentally fit of all the races to be rearing children. 

These are famous cases, but are not the only instances of poor African-Americans being targeted for scientific testing. In 1963, three physicians injected live cancer cells into chronically ill African-American test subjects.  In 1972, twenty primarily black, poor women were transported from Chicago to Philadelphia to receive abortions with a new abortion technique called the Super Coil. A complication of the new procedure was bleeding that would force a complete hysterectomy.  In the 1970’s, samples of black children’s blood was taken by the government, saying that they were testing it for anemia.  In fact, they were testing it for a predisposition to criminal activity.   

I have yet to finish the book and see what terrible things were perpetrated on Henrietta’s family in the years following her death.  Based on this history of scientific racism, however, I’m not predicting it will anything that I can look back on with pride.

 Sources and further reading:

    http://academic.udayton.edu/health/05bioethics/slavery02.htm

http://www.naturalnews.com/019189.html