The Search for the Legacy of the USPHS Syphilis Study at Tuskegee is a collection of essays from experts in a variety of fields seeking to redefine the legacy of the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The essayists place the legacy of the study within the evolution of racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Contributors include two leading historians on the study, two former United States Surgeons General, and other prominent scholars from a wide range of fields.

By structuring information in a systematic relational framework, narratives are cultural attractors that are particularly well-suited for transmission. The relational structure of narrative is partly what communicates causality, but this structure also complicates both transmission and selection on cultural elements by introducing correlations among narrative elements and between different narratives. These correlations have implications for adaptation, complexity, and robustness.

Historian James H. Jones published the first edition of Bad Blood, the definitive history of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in 1981. Its clear-eyed examination of that research and its implications remains a bioethics classic, and the 30-year anniversary of its publication served as the impetus for the reexamination of research ethics that this symposium presents. Recent revelations about the United States Public Health Service study that infected mental patients and prisoners in Guatemala with syphilis in the late 1940s in order (...) to determine the efficacy of treatment represent only one of the many attestations to the persistence of ongoing, critical, and underaddressed issues in research ethics that Bad Blood first explored. Those issues include, but are not limited to: the complex and contested matters of the value of a given research question, the validity of the clinical trial designed to address it, and the priorities of science. (shrink)

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a major health and human rights problem globally. However, empirical findings on the predictors of IPV cross-culturally are highly inconsistent, and the theory of IPV is underdeveloped. We propose a new analytical framework based on cooperative game theory in which IPV is a function of the power relations of the dyadic relationship, not simply the actors involved. Using data from the 2005 Colombian Demographic and Health Survey, we test the hypothesis that IPV is predicted by (...) large asymmetries in dyadic power using a hierarchical generalized linear model. Results suggest that education, urban residence, age at sexual debut, whether the woman has other sexual partners, and the age difference between spouses have strong effects on the log-odds of a woman experiencing IPV. Cooperative game theory and social network analysis offer a general approach to the problem of intimate partner interactions which can be applied broadly cross-culturally. (shrink)