Tuskegee Syphilis Study Whistleblower Peter Buxtun Died at 86

NEW YORK — Peter Buxtun, the whistleblower who revealed that the U.S. government allowed hundreds of black men in rural Alabama to go untreated for syphilis in what became known as the Tuskegee study, has died. He was 86 years old.

Buxtun died May 18 of Alzheimer’s disease in Rocklin, Calif., according to his attorney, Minna Fernan.

Buxtun is revered as a hero by public health scholars and ethicists for his role in bringing to light the most notorious medical research scandal in US history. The documents Buxtun provided to the Associated Press, and its subsequent investigation and reporting, led to a public outcry that ended the study in 1972.

Forty years earlier, in 1932, federal scientists began studying 400 black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, who were infected with syphilis. When antibiotics became available in the 1940s that could treat the disease, federal health officials ordered the medications to be discontinued. The study became an observation of how the disease ravaged the body over time.

In the mid-1960s, Buxtun was a federal public health official working in San Francisco when he overheard a co-worker talking about the study. The research wasn’t exactly a secret—about a dozen medical journal articles on the subject had been published over the previous 20 years. But almost no one raised any concerns about the way the experiment was being conducted.

“This study has been fully accepted by the American medical community,” said Ted Pestorius of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaking at a 2022 program marking the 50th anniversary of the end of the study.

Buxtun had a different reaction. After learning more about the study, he raised ethical concerns in a 1966 letter to CDC officials. In 1967, he was summoned to a meeting in Atlanta, where he was reprimanded by agency officials for what they considered impertinence. Repeatedly, agency leaders rejected his complaints and his plea for the men at Tuskegee to be treated.

He left the U.S. Public Health Service and attended law school, but the study consumed him. In 1972, he provided documents about the research to Edith Lederer, an AP reporter he met in San Francisco. Lederer passed the documents to AP investigative reporter Jean Heller, telling his colleague, “I think there might be something here.”

Heller’s story was published on July 25, 1972, leading to congressional hearings, a class action lawsuit that resulted in a $10 million settlement. town and the closure of the study approximately four months later. In 1997, President Bill Clinton formally apologized for the study, calling it “shameful.”

The leader of a group dedicated to the memory of study participants said Monday he is grateful to Buxtun for exposing the experiment.

“We are grateful for their honesty and courage,” said Lille Tyson Head, whose father was in the study.

Buxtun was born in Prague in 1937. His father was Jewish and his family immigrated to the US in 1939 from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, eventually settling in Irish Bend, Oregon, on the Columbia River.

In his complaints to federal health authorities, he drew comparisons between the Tuskegee study and the medical experiments that Nazi doctors performed on Jews and other prisoners. Federal scientists did not believe they were guilty of the same kind of moral and ethical sins, but after the Tuskegee study was exposed, the government implemented new rules about how it conducts medical research. Today, the study is often blamed for the reluctance of some African Americans to participate in medical research.

“Peter’s life experiences led him to immediately identify the study as morally indefensible and to seek justice in the treatment of men. Ultimately, he could not relent,” said the CDC’s Pestorius.

Buxtun attended the University of Oregon, served in the U.S. Army as a combat medic and psychiatric social worker, and entered the federal health service in 1965.

Buxtun wrote, gave presentations, and won awards for his involvement in the Tuskegee study. A global traveler, he collected and sold antiques, especially military guns and swords and gambling equipment from the California Gold Rush era.

He also spent more than 20 years trying to recover his family’s properties confiscated by the Nazis and was partially successful.

“Peter was wise, witty, elegant and unceasingly generous,” said David M. Golden, a close friend of Buxtun’s for more than 25 years. “He was a staunch defender of personal freedoms and spoke frequently against prohibition, be it on drugs, prostitution or firearms.”

Another longtime friend, Angie Bailie, said she watched many of Buxtun’s presentations about Tuskegee.

“Peter never finished a single talk without holding back tears,” she said.

Buxtun himself can be modest about his actions, saying he did not anticipate the vitriolic reaction of some health officials when he began to question the ethics of the study.

At a Johns Hopkins University forum in 2018, Buxtun was asked where he got the moral strength to speak out.

“It wasn’t force,” he said. “It was stupid.”

__

AP reporters Edith M. Lederer in New York and Kim Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed. Lederer was friends with Peter Buxtun for more than 50 years and played a major role in the AP’s reporting on the Tuskegee study.