Using Human Beings as Laboratory Animals:

The true nature of the experiment had to be kept from the subject to ensure their cooperation. The sharecropper's grossly disadvantaged a lot in life made them easy to manipulate. Please at the prospect of free medical care, almost none of them had ever seen a doctor before, these unsophisticated and trusting men became pawns in what James Jones author of the excellent history on the subject, Bad Blood, identified as the longest nontherapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history.

The study was meant to discover how syphilis affected blacks as oppose to whites, the theory being that whites experienced more neurological complications from syphilis where is blacks were more susceptible to cardiovascular damage.

How this knowledge would change clinical tretment of syphilis is uncertain. Although the PHS touted study as one of great scientific merit, from the outset it's actually benefits were hazy. It took almost forty years before someone involved in the study took a hard and honest look at the end results, reporting that "nothing learned will prevent, find, or cure a single case of infectious syhpilis or bring us closer to our basic mission of controlling veneral diseases in the United States".

When the experiment was brought to the attention of the media in 1972, news anchor Harry Reasoner described it as an experiment that "used human beings a laboratory animals in a long and inefficient study of How Long it takes Syphilis to Kill Someone.