ABSTRACT
Congress created an ad hoc blue ribbon panel to review both the Tuskegee study and the adequacy of existing protections for subjects in all federally sponsored research. One of the bitter if generally unacknowledged ironies of the Tuskegee study is that, while it occupies a special place of shame in the annals of human experimentation, its findings are still widely cited by the contemporary biomedical community. The “bad ethics, therefore bad science” argument actually has two distinct components. One part of the argument holds that researchers engaged in obvious immoral conduct with their subjects could not generate useful or valid scientific findings. The second part holds that when the ethical conduct of research is egregiously immoral then any findings obtained ought not to be admitted into the body of scientific knowledge. There are obvious limits to the extent to which anyone writing a scientific paper or book can review the circumstances and conditions under which scientific knowledge was obtained.
