Ethics in research

Research on people can be so questionable.  In Afghanistan, there was a big push by a major US university to do research on the impact of village based schools.  Randomly selecting villages in an area to have resources invested in village schools and teachers.  And studying the difference between those villages and the control villages, in the same area, that had no intervention.  Seems unethical to me.  So does this:

In a study of elderly nursing home patients, one group was told they could decide how their room would be arranged, and could choose a plant to care for. Another group had their rooms set up for them and a plant chosen and tended to for them. Eighteen months later 15 percent of the patients in the group given control had died, compared with 30 percent in the passive group.