Guatemala and Tuskegee Syphillis Studies

In a period between 1932 and 1972, both Guatemalan men and African American Men in Tuskegee, Alabama were infected with venereal diseases, the most notable among them syphillis without their consent.

The men in Tuskegee were infected first, injected and tested frequently. Some were even told that spinal taps that were a part of the study were special free medical procedures. And when penicillin became available as a cure, none of the men were treated with it and their life expectancy dropped by almost half.

The Guatemalan men ranged from soldiers to prisoners and were sent infected prostitutes as "gifts", and infected through scrapes doctors made on various parts of their body.

Though the second group of men were infected for the purpose of testing penicillin as a cure, both of these experiments were conducted without ethics of any sort, violation all but two of the Nuremberg Codes established after WWII specifically for this kind of testing. There was no type of informed consent and especially in the Tuskegee trail, the doctors tried very little to reduce the risk of long term issues as a result of their experiments.

If they had informed the men of what was going on and administered medicine to the men in Tuskegee, or at least offered some sort of compensation to those families, they wouldn't have violated so many ethical guidelines. The downside there, though, is that almost no one would willingly be infected with syphilis.