From the 1930's through the 1970's the U.S. Public Health Service (Now the Deparment of Health and Human Services) performed clinical studies on the progression of untreated syphilis on rural black Americans in the South.

Under the guise of receiving free healthcare the men were left to suffer the slow onset of increasingly severe symptoms despite penicillin being a known course of treatment for syphilis since the early 40's.

If you're interested in learning more about the history of racism in American medicine I would highly recommend the book "Medical Apartheid" as it goes into great detail on Tuskeegee and other less known cases of experimentation and lower standard of medical care black people received in the US from colonial to modern times.

Please note that, in AskHistorians, the onus is on you to provide appropriate evidence for the historical claims you make. Stating that it can be found on Google is not helpful. Mentioning something you may have heard once is not helpful. Guessing based on what you remember from X number of years after the event is not helpful.

Proper comments for this subreddit should be in-depth, comprehensive, and informative while properly situating the answer in its historical context. It should also be backed by appropriate primary and secondary sources, whether or not explicitly mentioned in the comment (i.e. you should always be ready to provide sources if asked). In other words, answers here should be such as an historian of the subject would give. Simply writing a one or two sentence answer that only provides an example without contextualizing it is not sufficient for a top-level answer on this subreddit.

Thank you.

The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment comes to mind. wikipedia link There's also the fact that the government performed forced sterilizations from around 1907 into the '60s on those deemed "unfit" wikipedia link

Edit: Forgot that this was AskHistorians so let me elaborate a bit. Forgive me if its a bit choppy, I'm summarizing this from a presentation I did in college a couple years back.

So when Darwin came out with his theory on evolution it didn't take long for others to wonder if social traits in humans were genetic. His cousin, Sir Francis Galton explored the variation of social traits, such as criminality, promiscuity, mental disorders, and came to the conclusion that those in upper social positions were there because of their superior genetic makeup. So Then in 1897 we have the first attempt in Michigan to pass a compulsory sterilization law, it doesn't get enough votes from the legislature. 1905 Pennsylvania legislature passed a sterilization law but the governor vetoed. 1907 Indiana successfully passes sterilization legislation. Thirty-two other states pass legislation as well. However, sterilization rates remained low until the Buck v. Bell case.

In 1924, 18 year old Carrie Buck of Virginia was in the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy wanted to see if the new sterilization law in VA would pass legal challenge, he claimed that Buck needed to be sterilized, as she supposedly had a mental age of 9. Her mother also allegedly had a mental age of 8. The mother had had 3 children without knowing the fathers of any of them. Carrie had been adopted by another family and had a child out of wedlock and committed to the State Colony. In all actuality, she was raped by a nephew of her adopted family and in order to save face was sent away. The case made its way up to the Supreme Court and in an 8 to 1 decision they gave the ok to sterilize Carrie Buck. Justice Oliver Holmes wrote, "We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes." link He concluded his argument "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." This in turn gave the OK for forced or coerced sterilizations.

Those who were targeted for sterilizations were generally anyone deemed mentally deficient. Men were sterilized to rehabilitate them from jail and to prevent their destructive traits (crime). Women were sterilized to 'cure' their sexual misconduct/promiscuity/prostitution, all of which were seen as a symptom of feeble-mindedness. [picture on the levels of being an imbecile](http://h plusbiopolitics.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/story.jpg)

Between 1907-1963 over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized. Around the '30s more women than men were being sterilized. (By 1962 61% of the 62,162 sterilizations were performed on women). California was the state with the most sterilizations with a conservative figure of 20,180 people sterilized.

Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments

Between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service experimented on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men were from the poorest county in Alabama and were never told what disease they were suffering from other than 'bad blood'.

"The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, 'we have no further interest in these patients until they die.'" link

In total 28 men died directly of syphilis, 100 men died from syphilis-related complications, 40 of their wives were infected and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis.

SOURCES

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmtuskegee1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Sanger#Eugenics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45/300.html

http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/CA/CA.html

http://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Francis_Galton#Heredity.2C_historiometry_and_eugenics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

Dorr, Gregory (2008). Segregation's Science. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. pp. 10.

Lombardo, Paul A., Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.

I don't have any more information, but a question. You mentioned spraying bacteria of the cost of California. Got any more information on that, perhaps a more searchable term?

Are you referring strictly to "things" tested by the government? Or are you also including tests of policy? If the latter, you may want to look into the US's sterilization program in Puerto Rico in the mid-20th century. There's quite a bit of debate on the topic, so I'll remove my comment if it's inappropriate for this sub. Many questions concern the degree to which the consent of the women was informed and whether they were coerced into sterilization procedures.

Some argue that it was a designed program of population control rooted in colonialism. Others claim that the sterilization was willingly pursued by Puerto Rican women, but that this decision was heavily influenced by a limited access to other forms of contraception and ignorance of the procedure's permanent nature.

Part of the argument is also framed by how you view sterilization trends that continued beyond the time frame of active US government intervention. As this study shows, there remained a preference for sterilization in Puerto Rico stretching at least into the 1980s. I am not very well-versed in the details myself and, given the controversial nature of the topic, impartial sources are difficult to find.

Can I piggy back a question here... There seems to be a high level of distrust of "the government" amongst Americans. Has this always been the case? Does this distrust mainly come from revelations about programs like what OP is referring to? Is it because it was drilled into them as part of the Cold War e.g. Communism / USSR = big government, small government = freedom?

When you look at these incidents, I would recommend keeping clear what the particular misdeed was; in many cases, what one might be looking for is the failure to provide an opportunity for informed consent from the patient, coupled with the professional responsibility of a doctor to do the best they can for an individual patient's welfare rather than "choosing martyrs" for some notion of a greater good. Which is, as I'll suggest, a relatively recent phenomenon as the medical research default, specifically 1964. Then, of course, you have the complicating factors of experimentation on marginalized groups within the US or non-citizens in foreign countries without the defense of domestic law to stand between them and American researchers, and whatever structural -isms that might generate a somewhat cavalier attitude towards individual human welfare.

A useful source would be Susan Reverby's Examining Tuskegee, which covers a wide variety of these programs in the 20th century. More on that in a bit.

It's probably worth noting that some historians (Sex, Sin, and Science: A History of Syphilis in America, John Parascandola) argue that, complicating the popular portrayal of Tuskegee, the initial design of the program was to study and treat what was regarded as a syphilis epidemic that was especially prevalent in the black community in those areas. When the depression (and structural racism, in terms of priorities, no doubt) drove funding cuts, government-and-private-funded treatment was no longer on the table and the choice before researchers was monitoring without treatment or no monitoring with no treatment. Along the way there were multiple smaller-scale choices about withholding information from patients about the current state of treatment in medical science and that kind of thing.

I would say that the cuts in private funding in 1931 are certainly a big factor in switching to an observation-only phase from an initial attempt at treatment as part of a broader anti-std initiative, but it's worth underlining that the previous treatment efforts on black men were with highly toxic chemicals that had low cure outcomes and terrible side effects. This does not speak well to whether the scientists in question regarded the subjects more as patients than guinea pigs. Subsequently, treatment was still withheld after the draft and penicillin's wide availability in 1940 as part of war-minded preparations of war-age men, which is probably the more widely known aspect of the case.

But at the very least Parascondola gives us the root of an answer for how the decision might have been initially approached.

Back to Reverby: it gets even more clear-cut with the recently uncovered (by Reverby) and never-published study in Guatemala from 1946-48, under scientists and doctors who would continue on with the post-1948 Tuskegee observations such as Jay Cutler. In this study, prostitutes were infected with syphilis deliberately and then used to infect inmates, soldiers, and others under observation; if the syphilis failed to take they would be injected with it directly. At which point penicillin would or would not be employed, depending on the needs of the observers. Needless to say, deliberate infection, from the same minds that brought and kept Tuskegee alive including former surgeon general Thomas Parran, actually leaves us right back at the popular idea that the US government was guilty of sponsoring unethical, inhumane, and criminal conduct on the part of scientists and doctors. But the details, again, give us a sense for how these things happened; Parran himself freely acknowledged that these particular experiments could never have been done in the US, but apparently that was not something that gave him pause.

It's worth underlining that the public-private partnership in many of these cases makes it difficult sometimes to say "the government did x". In 1955 doctors at the Willowbrook facility in New York capitalized on an exiting hepatitis B epidemic among the mentally disabled children in the facility, in order to further spread the virus to create immunities. They had government funding, from Armed Forces Epidemiology within the Surgeon General's office, but again, it's probably useful to keep these ambiguous chains of command in mind.

They did obtain about as informed consent as you can get from parents who are laypersons, but there are many obvious ethical problems with the experiments. You can see the consent forms here and this relatively recent apologia for the experiments should give you a good idea of how fraught the question still is for some experts on bioethics.

At that point you get to initiatives like Chester Southam's injection of live cancer cells into non-cancerous elderly patients without their informed consent in 1961; he was outed by fellow doctors and was mildly censured, but it does illustrate the generally permissive mindset of researchers generally in terms of ethics vs. results. This brings us to 1964 and the Helsinki Declaration, wherein the "informed consent" standard and the "no martyr" standard, among many other useful and constantly evolving things, were internationally codified as a medical standard. Note that the Willowbrook experiments would continue in some form until 1970, and there are probably other examples that, at best, blur that seemingly unequivocal Helsinki standard around the problem of targeting marginalized or incompletely informed groups.

Just for clarification, are the examples you mentioned ones that you already know enough about, or are those things you've heard about and would like further explanation and sources confirming/disproving them?

Wasn't there one in St. Louis? A military experiment in the poor areas of the city in the 50's?

The US Army Chemical Corps conducted Operation LAC. Under false pretense planes were used to disperse Zinc Cadmium Sulfide on more than 30 test sites in the US and Canada, including major urban centers such as Minneapolis and St. Louis.

The tests were purportedly used to develop and verify meteorologic models for estimating the dispersion of aerosols in various environments. However, the real purpose was to obtain information that would be useful for estimating the potential dispersion of BW agents and determining munitions requirements for the strategic use of BW agents against selected cities of the former Soviet Union.

I tried to read through a few papers and articles about the potential health risks of Zinc Cadmium at the exposure levels in these tests, but quickly realized I don't have the background to critically understand what I'm reading. What the Army admits by its own reports is that civilian officials and the public were mislead about the nature of the experiments.

Here is one source

The above source also discusses what you're referring to when you mention "spraying bacteria off the coast of California".

"In addition, the Army conducted field testing with B. globigii and Aspergillus. S. marcescens and Bacillus subtilis were also released in San Francisco and New York subway systems, respectively, to study their dispersion."