[tolien]

Not really; by that point the damage was done.

The subjects would’ve benefitted equally by the doctors being put in prison for the rest of their lives (or given the death penalty, per Nuremberg) if only to set an example to the rest of the field.

[graeme]

What? No. Punishing the researchers benefits society through deterrence. What the patients needed was treatment. The earlier the better.

Massive damage was already done to their bodies, but you can still get rid of late stage syphillis with penicillin and prevent further damage.

[tolien]

Treatment's a matter for a public health service rather than other researchers though, right? There's not much science in another group of researchers taking over to test how penicillin treats syphilis; that's already settled. Access to the affected patients would then be a legal matter - the records would be seized by the police and/or prosecutors and that's a very different kettle of fish to the original example.

For what it’s worth, Tuskegee just happened to be the ethical failure that came to mind because it's been in the media recently (in the context of "why do PoC have reticence to take vaccination", i.e. for COVID-19). There's plenty of other examples where the damage was irreparably done [1, 2] where it would be questionable to hand the participants' personal information over to another group of researchers for further study.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentatio...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_329