Story highlights Lawsuit says scientists infected hundreds of Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases

A similar lawsuit filed against the U.S. government was dismissed

(CNN) Remember the Tuskegee syphilis experiment from the 1930s?

Scientists studied poor African-Americans in Alabama who'd contracted the venereal disease but didn't tell them they had the disease or do anything to cure them.

A lawsuit filed this week alleges Johns Hopkins University and the Rockefeller Foundation helped conduct a similar study in Guatemala from 1945 to 1956.

Orphans, inmates, psychiatric patients and prostitutes were deliberately infected with sexually transmitted diseases to determine what drugs, including penicillin, worked best in stopping the diseases, the lawsuit says. The subjects of the experiments weren't told they'd been infected, the lawsuit says, causing some to die and others to pass the disease to their spouses, sexual partners and children.

The suit seeks more than $1 billion in damages and has 774 plaintiffs, including people who were subjects in the experiments and their descendants.

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