Ken Getz and Doug Peddicord, Washington Post
- As vice president for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Hospitals, Michelle Obama has driven real change in relations between the institution and the mostly black neighborhoods surrounding it, working to lessen the distance between the hospital system and African American patients, neighbors and local businesses.
But when university researchers proposed enrolling local girls in a clinical trial testing the HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, Obama stopped the project. According to the New York Times, “The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease.”
