John R. Heller Jr.
physician (1905-1989)
John Roderick 'Rod' Heller (February 27, 1905 – May 4, 1989) was an American physician. From 1943 to 1948 he was the director of the "Venereal Disease" section of the United States Public Health Service (PHS). He then became the director of the National Cancer Institute, and then president/chief executive officer of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
Dr. Heller is best known for having been the assistant in charge of on-site medical operations in the Tuskegee syphilis study, a longitudinal clinical examination by PHS of untreated syphilis in U.S. African-American males. Very serious questions of medical ethics have been raised about this study and those involved in it.
Biography
Tuskegee syphilis study
A native of the U.S. South, Heller was born in South Carolina. He was directly descended, on both his father's and his mother's side, from soldiers who had fought for the Confederate States of America. He was awarded a bachelor of science degree from Clemson University in 1925, and graduated in 1929 from Emory University School of Medicine. In 1930, shortly after completing his internship, he began working in public health and was commissioned in 1934 in the United States Public Health Service.
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This entry incorporates text from “John R. Heller Jr.” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.