Trust Must Be Earned

From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service enrolled hundreds of Black men in Macon County, Alabama, in a study of untreated syphilis. The men were not told the true purpose of the study, and they were not given adequate information to make an informed choice.

Even after penicillin became the accepted treatment for syphilis, the men in the study were not offered it, and steps were taken that kept them from receiving treatment elsewhere. The study continued for forty years and ended in 1972 after it was reported publicly.

Men died. Wives and children were affected. The harm did not stay inside the study, and it did not end when the study ended. That history happened in Alabama, in communities close to where ACM is based.

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman from Virginia, was treated for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Cells taken from her tumor were grown in a laboratory without her knowledge or consent, becoming the HeLa cell line.

HeLa cells have been used in research worldwide for more than seventy years and have contributed to major scientific and commercial advances. Her family was not asked, was not informed for decades, and did not share in the benefits that followed.

Her name matters here because it marks a specific failure: research that treated a person's body as material and her consent as unnecessary.