About 800 black men from Tuskegee, in the racist state of Alabama, participated between 1932 and 1972 in the so-called "Tuskegee experiment of untreated syphilis in black men" to study the natural history of the then incurable disease. Mostly illiterate and lacking in resources, they were deceived and recruited in exchange for food and the promise that their burial would be paid for if they died during the experiment. Funded by the US Public Health Service, it continued despite the arrival of effective treatments in 1945. A social worker put an end to it by reporting it to the press in 1972. President Clinton publicly apologized for the monstrous experiment in 1997: "Your rights were trampled on."