8 Shockingly Unethical Experiments That Actually Happened

2. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, a 40-year project by the US Public Health Service in Alabama to study the long term effects of syphilis, is one of the more infamous and deplorable experiments ever conducted by the US government.

The way they went about it was to purposely infect 399 impoverished African American men and leave them untreated to allow the disease to naturally progress. They administered it under the pretence of giving the men a free treatment for "bad blood" and they were not informed of the true nature of the experiment.

By 1972, when the study ended, of the original 399 men, 28 had died of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis.