Tusked away

A dark episode in U.S. history came to a close Sunday as Ernest Hendon, the last living "participant" in the Tuskegee syphilis study, died at the age of 96. From 1932 to 1972, the federal Public Health Service gave syphilis to 623 black men in Alabama to determine the disease’s affects on humans, and they didn’t even get to contract it the fun way. A lawsuit gave the survivors free health care, and $9 million to split among the survivors and their families, or less than $15,000 each. Apparently no smallpox blankets were available. Twenty-five years after the experiment ended, President Clinton issued a formal apology, one of the few he gave for something that actually wasn’t his fault.