Peter Buxtun, who blew the lid off the so-called Tuskegee study in which the U.S. government withheld syphilis treatment from hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama over decades in a macabre and racist experiment, has died.
He was 86.
His cause of death was Alzheimer’s disease, said his attorney Minna Fernan. He died May 18 in Rocklin, Calif.
Buxtun earned hero status among public health scholars and ethicists in the early 1970s, when he exposed the fact that hundreds of rural Black men who were under the impression they were being treated for “bad blood” were not being treated at all.
The experiment started in 1932, when the U.S. Public Health Service and the Tuskegee Institute began studying the “natural history of syphilis” in 600 Black men, 399 of whom had the disease, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Researchers gave the participants medical exams, meals and burial insurance but did not obtain their informed consent. Neither did they offer penicillin when it became widely available in 1943.
Buxtun learned of the project as a public health worker in San Francisco in the 1960s and tried to draw attention to the ethical considerations, but was rebuffed as a troublemaker and labeled impertinent by higher-ups.
It wasn’t until he leaked documents to The Associated Press in 1972 detailing the study that congressional hearings were held and the study discontinued, after 40 years.
At the end of the investigation, the men in the study sued and received a $10 million settlement. New laws were passed stipulating how to treat research subjects. More than 20 years after that, then-President Bill Clinton gave an apology for the “shameful” study.
On Monday, one of the original participants’ daughters expressed gratitude for Buxtun’s contribution.
“We are thankful for his honesty and his courage,” said Lille Tyson Head, who leads the Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation established to memorialize the study participants and promote bioethics in research.
With News Wire Services