A national disgrace In a 1997 White House ceremony, President Bill Clinton offers an official apology to 94-year-old Herman Shaw and other African American men whose syphilis went untreated by government doctors and researchers in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a research undertaking conducted from 1932 to 1972, prior to the emergence of Institutional Review Boards. In this infamous study, 399 participants were not informed that they had the disease, and they continued to go untreated even after it was discovered that penicillin is an effective intervention for syphilis.