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An African Americna male patient looks carefully at a needle injected by a white researcher.

Hundreds of black men were tricked into volunteering as human guinea pigs. For 40 years, no one stepped in to stop it. That was the point of the experiment.

U.S. government doctors told Alabama sharecroppers suffering from syphilis that they had “bad blood” and duped them into enrolling in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Then, the doctors observed the men – without administering treatment – as the disease progressed.

Participants were offered $50 to pay for their own burial. Some unknowingly infected their wives and children.

The now-infamous study didn’t end until after it was exposed July 25, 1972 by a 23-year-old Associated Press reporter who was tipped off by a government whistleblower from San Francisco.

Another quarter century would pass before President Clinton invited the few remaining survivors to the White House and publicly apologized for the “shameful” and “clearly racist” medical research.

“Why in the hell did they let all these people die when they already knew what the results would be? It makes no moral sense to me,” said Jean Heller, the AP reporter who broke the story, in...