IIt isn’t just that people of color are excluded from medical research; in many cases, they are wary of participating — for good reason.

Sir Francis Galton, a statistician and cousin of Charles Darwin, popularized in the 1880s the pseudoscience of eugenics. Eugenics was intended to “encourage fit and fertile matings among the better classes” and “cut off the inheritance lines of the most worthless.”

This included the weak, the feeble-minded, the deformed, and mentally ill, along with alcoholics, criminals, and paupers. But in practice, eugenics resulted mostly in the forced or coerced sterilization of non-white people. Being born black and poor meant you were “criminalistic,” Native Americans were assumed to be alcoholics, and Hispanics “feeble-minded.” The practice went on for years in public hospitals, prisons, and insane asylums across the United States.

Another gruesome example of unscientific medical research, this time conducted specifically on black men, was the 40-year-long Tuskegee Experiment. Started by the Public Health Service in Alabama in 1932, the doctors who ran the Tuskegee Experiment recruited poor black men that had syphilis but didn’t know it.

Doctors lied to them, telling them they had “bad blood” and giving placebos for treatment. Even after the disease became treatable with penicillin in the 1940s, it was never administered to the participants. Instead, the men died, went blind, grew insane, or experienced other severe health problems.

In July 1972, the Associated Press broke the story, resulting in a class action lawsuit. The resulting $10 million settlement, free medical care, and burial expenses were a pittance compared to the lasting legacy of this collective trauma.

People of color have been taken advantage of in research in more subtle ways as well. Few knew about the commercialization of Henrietta Lacks’ “immortal” cancer cells until a book about her life was published in 2010. In 1951 John Hopkins Medical Center extracted her cancer cells, now called “HeLa” cells, during a biopsy at their “Negro ward;” the cells were used for research without Lacks’ or her family’s knowledge. Lacks was a poor black tobacco farmer who died the same year she entered the hospital. But her cells went on to enable cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, the polio vaccine, and many types of cancer research. For more than half a century, John Hopkins Medical Center profited from the unique, industrious, and immortal cells of Henrietta Lacks, while her family remained in poverty.