After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Nazi Germany implemented rules stripping the family of their German citizenship.
[2] Katz was named to serve on a federal inquiry into the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, an experiment started in 1932 by the United States Public Health Service in which about 400 black men in Alabama infected with syphilis were left untreated, with at least 28 of the study subjects dying from the untreated disease and many more suffering severe injury.
The group concluded that the research was "ethically unjustified", that the participants should have been given penicillin and called for greater federal oversight and protection of subjects in medical studies.
Katz protested that the group should have issued a stronger response, noting that the subjects were "exploited, manipulated and deceived".
[5] In 1996, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration implemented changes that allowed doctors to perform medical studies on patients without their consent in certain situations where the patient has a life-threatening condition and cannot offer consent, where the community has been notified about the experiment and where the FDA has reviewed the plans in advance and approved of the protocol.
Katz insisted that these changes violated the Nuremberg Code enacted in response to Nazi human experimentation conducted on unwilling prisoners during World War II, noting that "here we are making exceptions" to the first sentence of the Code's first point, which states that "The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential".