Tuskegee syphilis study whistleblower Peter Buxtun has died at age 86
NEW YORK — Peter Buxtun, the whistleblower who exposed how the U.S. government left hundreds of black men in rural Alabama untreated for syphilis in what became known as the Tuskegee Study, has died. He was 86.
Buxtun died on May 18 of Alzheimer’s disease in Rocklin, California, said his attorney, Minna Fernan.
Buxtun is revered as a hero by public health scientists and ethicists for his role in exposing the most notorious medical research scandal in American history. Documents Buxtun provided to The Associated Press, and the 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 to treat the disease, federal health officials ordered that the drugs not be given. 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 heard a colleague mention the study. The research wasn’t exactly secret: About a dozen medical journal articles had been published about it in the previous 20 years. But almost no one had raised concerns about the way the experiment was being conducted.
“This study was fully accepted by the American medical community,” said Ted Pestorius of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, speaking at a 2022 program marking the 50th anniversary of the study’s end.
Buxtun reacted differently. 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 agency officials berated him for what they saw as impudence. Agency leaders repeatedly rejected his complaints and his calls to treat the men at Tuskegee.
He left the U.S. Public Health Service and went to law school, but the study ate away at him. In 1972, he gave documents about the investigation to Edith Lederer, an AP reporter he had met in San Francisco. Lederer gave the documents to AP investigative reporter Jean Heller, telling her colleague, “I think there might be something here.”
Heller’s story was published on July 25, 1972, leading to congressional hearings and a class-action lawsuit that resulted in $10 million in damages. settlement and the termination of the study approximately four months later. In 1997, President Bill Clinton formally apologized for the study, which he called “disgraceful.”
The leader of a group dedicated to the memory of the study’s participants said Monday they were grateful to Buxtun for revealing the experiment.
“We are grateful for his 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 emigrated from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to the United States in 1939. They eventually settled in Irish Bend, Oregon on the Columbia River.
In his complaints to federal health officials, he drew comparisons between the Tuskegee study and medical experiments that Nazi doctors had conducted 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, government has introduced new rules about how it conducts medical research. Today, the study is often blamed for some African Americans not wanting 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 form of treatment for the men. Ultimately, he could not give in,” the CDC’s Pestorius said.
Buxtun attended the University of Oregon, served in the U.S. Army as a combat medic and psychiatric social worker, and joined the federal health service in 1965.
Buxtun continued to write, give presentations, and win awards for his involvement in the Tuskegee study. A world traveler, he collected and sold antiques, particularly military weapons and swords, and gambling equipment from the California Gold Rush era.
He also spent more than 20 years trying to recover his family’s property confiscated by the Nazis, with partial success.
“Peter was wise, witty, stylish and unfailingly generous,” said David M. Golden, a close friend of Buxtun’s for more than 25 years. “He was a staunch advocate of personal liberties and often spoke out against Prohibition, whether it was drugs, prostitution or guns.”
Another good friend, Angie Bailie, said she had attended many of Buxtun’s presentations about Tuskegee.
“Peter never ended a single conversation without holding back tears,” she said
Buxtun himself might be somewhat modest about his actions. He said he did not expect the venomous reaction from some health officials when he began questioning the ethics of the study.
At a 2018 Johns Hopkins University forum, Buxtun was asked where he found the moral strength to act as a whistleblower.
“It wasn’t strength,” he said. “It was stupidity.”
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AP reporters Edith M. Lederer in New York and Kim Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed. Lederer was a friend of Peter Buxtun for more than 50 years and played a role in the AP report on the Tuskegee study.