The Tuskegee Syphilis Study apology

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was a study started around the 1930’s. At first the program wasn’t a study it was a plan set in place to treat syphilis, but first they had to determine who had the disease so massive testing was initiated. Then the Great Depression hit and there was no money for the actual treatment phase. The leaders in the study at this point decided not to tell the individuals who were infected that they did not have the money to treat them, instead they lied and gave them placebos and studied the progress of the disease for 40 years. In the apology that former President Bill Clinton gave apologized or the unethical treatment and misinformation giving to the men involved in the Tuskegee Study. He also emphasized four points that would insure that something like the Tuskegee Study would not happen again and prevent any other type of unethical treatment of patients happened again.
My initial reaction to the apology was that it was a pretty standard national apology but I after I read on and began to think more deeply about what happened I kept thinking that whatever he said was not going to make up for what happened. How can anyone apologize for the things that happened during the Tuskegee Study? It was also a big step for the nation because when it comes to the United States as a whole we are not known for admitting we were wrong. So for the president to personally and publicly apologize was a big step for the nation. I was not expecting him to announce those goals. Some most of them I was pretty standard stuff but the one about starting a graduate program in ethics was kind of weird because I assumed that there were already such programs out there already, but I guess not because this was really the first time when a huge unethical problem pertaining to medicine had happened in the United Stated. I just would have thought that after the Nazi trials that an ethics graduate program would have been created.

http://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/clintonp.htm