Collaborative Research Paper Regarding 'Night Doctors' The Lacks family was justified in their suspicion of the John Hopkins hospital and the medical establishment, because of Eugene Saenger’s experiment concerning the Tuskegee
Syphilis Study and the 'rumor' of the "Night Doctors" in the John Hopkins Hospital. Even though the cause of the Tuskegee Syphilis study was to find the cure for syphilis, the way in which he tried to solve this was one of the worst ways possible. After all, sometimes the cause does not justify the means. One of the terrible things done by John Hopkins hospital in the late 90s was a study on the effect of lead in multiple houses, some more than others. The Hopkins' researchers told landlords to rent them out to families with kids. A quote from The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks that proves it's existence, "it's researchers had knowingly exposed their children to lead, and hadn't promptly informed them when blood tests revealed that their children had elevated lead levels­ even when one developed lead poisoning" (Skloot 168). During this time, almost every hospital and research facility required consent forms under the law. Unfortunately, the consent forms were not required to go in detail during this experiment, so they families never knew about the lethal amounts of lead around and in the house, that could lead poisoning and even death. The researchers, although indirectly, lied to the families just to see how lead affects children, which is lethal, as it is kind of obvious, because the children are of a smaller size and potentially weaker. In the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, things were much worse. In the study, not much information was gained, and even when a very effective cure was found, they kept it from the subjects, making the study useless. "Even when penicillin became the drug of choice for syphilis in 1947, researchers did not offer it to the subjects"(The Tuskegee Timeline). The study was ethically

wrong, and didn't actually gain any information we didn't know. It was just another act of medical racism that had changed the way many people, including the Lacks family, viewed the government, especially the people involved in the medical association. Meanwhile, one of the people who contributed to the myth of the 'night doctors' was Eugene
Saenger, who had started the Cincinnati Radiation Tests where he and others observed the effects of radium on cancer patients during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Saenger