Update (3/29/2018): If a building is named for a person tied to troubling ethical lapses, should the name be changed? Would renaming Pitt’s Parran Hall do enough to address the wrongdoing of the man who founded the public health school 70 years ago?
While digging through archival papers, Dober found a memo where Parran singles out Macon County, Ala., as the “ideal location” to study the impact of syphilis on the Black population “uninfluenced by treatment,” explaining that the study — which began eight months later — could be done with a group of “untreated” subjects.
Before the discovery of penicillin as a treatment, syphilis was deadly. Yet hundreds of Black men served as test subjects in a 40-year experiment for which Parran served as the clear inspiration, Dober said. In that period, researchers failed to give them new treatment and did not inform them that the goal of the study was to catalogue the harms of untreated syphilis on human subjects.
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