Peter Buxtun, Who Exposed Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Dies at 86

Peter Buxtun, a whistle-blower who in 1972 exposed a 40-year government experiment to track the effects of syphilis in Black men in Alabama — who were neither told that they had the disease nor offered treatment — died on May 18 in Rocklin, Calif., near Sacramento. He was 86.

His death, in a memory care center, was from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said John K. Seidts, a close friend. The death was first reported on Monday by The Associated Press, to which Mr. Buxtun had turned over his files and which in 1972 published the first news articles about his disclosures.

Exposure of the Tuskegee Study, as the federal research was known, created a political furor that shut it down, but the study cast a long, dark shadow as an episode of official racism embedded in government policy. It was one of the worst medical ethics scandals in U.S. history, tarnishing the do-no-harm image of doctors and, especially, sowing mistrust of the medical establishment among many African Americans.

Mr. Buxtun, the son of a Jewish father who fled Czechoslovakia before World War II to escape persecution, was working as a venereal disease investigator for the U.S. Public Health Service in San Francisco in 1965 when he overheard a co-worker talking about the Tuskegee Study taking place in rural Alabama.

One of his first acts was to visit a library to research the crimes of Nazi doctors in World War II.

He contacted the Communicable Disease Center in Atlanta (now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), which had cooperated with the Public Health Service in overseeing the Tuskegee Study. The agency, making no effort to conceal the study from a government employee, sent him a manila envelope stuffed with reports.

“I didn’t believe it,” he recalled in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times in 1997. “I didn’t want to believe it. This was the Public Health Service. We didn’t do things like that.”

Officially known as the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, the research began in 1932 with the recruiting of about 400 poor, undereducated Black men in Macon County, Ala., whose seat is Tuskegee. All had been found to have syphilis.

The infected men were deceptively told that they had “bad blood,” not a sexually communicable disease that could lead to blindness, heart injury and death. The researchers wanted to use them as human guinea pigs, without their informed consent, to study the ravages of syphilis.

Even after penicillin was found in the 1940s to be an effective cure for syphilis, the men were not offered treatment. In one sample of 92 deceased men from the study, 30 percent were found to have died of syphilis complications.

In 1966, Mr. Buxtun sent a letter to the head of the venereal disease section of the Public Health Service raising questions about the study. “Have any of the men been told the nature of this study?” he demanded.

He was ordered to report to Atlanta, where an official “bursting with rage” scolded him for questioning the research, he later recalled.

He again wrote to the Public Health Service in 1968, calling for the study to be shut down, but he was ignored. Instead, the health service conducted a review that determined that the study should continue.

Mr. Buxtun wasn’t the only one raising ethical and moral alarms about the research. Updates on the study appeared in respected medical journals. In 1965, Dr. Irwin Schatz, a cardiologist, wrote an outraged letter to the senior author of one article calling for doctors to “re-evaluate their moral judgments.” He never heard back.

Bill Jenkins, a Black statistician with the Public Health Service in the 1960s, also raised alarms but received pushback from his bosses, and his efforts to interest the news media went nowhere.

But in the early 1970s, after Mr. Buxtun had left the health service for law school, he turned his files over to reporters for The Associated Press. An article by Jean Heller, an A.P. investigative reporter, ran on front pages around the country, including in The New York Times on July 26, 1972.

“All hell broke loose,” said Susan M. Reverby, the author of “Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy.”

Dr. Reverby, who got to know Mr. Buxtun, described him as a political libertarian and National Rifle Association member who was angry that the health agency where he worked, tracing people with sexually transmitted diseases, was denying treatment to the Alabama men.

“He thought it was outrageous and wrong,” she said, adding, “He was really a strong-willed, irascible guy.”

Hearings called by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, at which Mr. Buxtun testified, led to the termination of the study. A class-action lawsuit on behalf of survivors and descendants was settled for $10 million. In 1997, President Bill Clinton invited surviving Tuskegee subjects to the White House, where he offered a formal apology and called the government’s actions over four decades “shameful” and “clearly racist.”

Mr. Buxtun was born Peter Jan Buxbaum on Sept. 29, 1937, in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He was the only child of Pavel Buxbaum, a chemist whose family owned a millinery factory in Upice, Czechoslovakia, and Elfrieda (Reichardt) Buxbaum, a Catholic and a native of Austria.

With the rise of Hitler, Pavel Buxbaum moved his family to America in 1938, and they settled on a farm in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. He changed his given name to Paul.

Peter graduated from the University of Oregon, studying European history, and served in the U.S. Army as a medic. He settled in San Francisco, where he found a job in 1965 with the National Health Service tracking venereal disease.

Though he graduated from law school, he never practiced, his friend Mr. Seidts said. “My guess is Peter’s father left Peter pretty wealthy,” he added.

Mr. Buxtun bought and sold antique firearms and swords, and he traveled the world. Through a lawyer in Germany, he was able to regain title to a building his family had lost in the war; he sold it and used the money to help friends, including Mr. Seidts in his training to become a nurse.

Mr. Buxtun, who never married or had children, left no survivors.

When the Tuskegee Study was shut down, only about 70 men who had not received treatment were still alive. Each received $35,000 from their class-action suit, with the heirs of those who died receiving $15,000.

Congress and the National Institutes of Health rewrote the rules of human participation in medical experiments, requiring the informed consent of participants and peer review of the design of studies.

Still, decades after the study ended, mistrust of the medical establishment lingered among African Americans. Experts blamed the Tuskegee legacy for holding back government efforts in the 1980s and ’90s to slow the spread of AIDS in some Black communities.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, when Black Americans were at first less likely than white people to get vaccinated — the demographic imbalance eventually evened out — their initial hesitancy was attributed to a mistrust that traced in part to the Tuskegee Study that had ended almost 50 years earlier.