Peter Buxton, the whistleblower whose work known as the Tuskegee Study exposed how the US government withheld treatment for syphilis from hundreds of black men in rural Alabama, has died. He was 86. Photo via Getty Images.
NEW YORK (AP) — Peter Buxton, the whistleblower whose work known as the Tuskegee Study exposed how the U.S. government denied hundreds of black men in rural Alabama access to treatment for syphilis, has died at the age of 86.
Buxton died of Alzheimer’s disease on May 18 in Rocklin, California, according to his lawyer, Minna Farnan.
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Buxton is revered as a hero among public health scholars and ethicists for uncovering the most notorious medical research scandal in U.S. history. The documents he provided to The Associated Press, and the AP’s subsequent investigation and reporting, led to an outcry that led to the study being closed in 1972.
Forty years ago, in 1932, federal scientists began studying 400 black men with syphilis in Tuskegee, Alabama. When antibiotics that could treat the disease became available in the 1940s, federal health officials ordered the drug supply withheld. The study looked at how the disease affected the body over time.
While working as a federal public health officer in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, Buxton overheard colleagues discussing the study. The research wasn’t a secret: About a dozen medical journal articles about it had been published over the previous 20 years. But few people expressed concerns about the way the experiments were conducted.
“This study has been fully embraced by the American medical community,” Ted Pestorius of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said at a 2022 program marking the 50th anniversary of the study’s completion.
Buxton’s reaction was different. After learning more about the study, he expressed ethical concerns in a letter to CDC officials in 1966. In 1967, he was summoned to a meeting in Atlanta, where CDC officials accused him of disrespect. Repeatedly, CDC leaders rejected his complaints and his requests to treat the Tuskegee men.
He left the U.S. Public Health Service to attend law school, but the study haunted him. In 1972, he provided documents about the study to Associated Press reporter Edith Lederer, whom he met in San Francisco. Lederer passed the documents on to AP investigative reporter Jean Heller, who told her colleague, “There might be something here.”
Heller’s article was published on July 25, 1972, and led to congressional hearings and a class-action lawsuit that resulted in a $10 million settlement and the halting of the study about four months later. In 1997, President Bill Clinton issued a public apology for the study, calling it a “disgrace.”
The leader of a group dedicated to the memory of the study participants said Monday that he was grateful to Buxton for exposing the experiment.
“We’re grateful for his honesty and his courage,” said his father, Leal Tyson Head, who was part of the investigation.
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Buxton was born in Prague in 1937. His father was Jewish, and his family emigrated to the United States from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, eventually settling in Irish Bend, Oregon, on the Columbia River.
In his complaint to federal health officials, he compared the Tuskegee study to medical experiments conducted by Nazi doctors on Jewish and other prisoners. Although federal scientists did not consider themselves guilty of similar moral or ethical sins, after the Tuskegee study was exposed, the government enacted new rules for how medical research should be conducted. Today, the study is often blamed for the reluctance of some African Americans to participate in medical research.
“Peter’s life experiences quickly determined that this research was morally indefensible and he sought justice in the form of treatment for these men. Ultimately, he couldn’t give up,” the CDC’s Pestorius said.
Buxton 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.
Buxton continued to write and speak, and was awarded a prize for his involvement in the Tuskegee Study. He traveled the world and collected and sold antiques from the California Gold Rush, including military weapons, swords and gambling equipment.
He also spent more than 20 years trying, with partial success, to recover his family’s property that had been confiscated by the Nazis.
“Peter was smart, witty, elegant and always generous,” said David M. Golden, Buxton’s best friend for more than 25 years. “He was a strong advocate of individual freedom and frequently spoke out against prohibition, including drugs, prostitution and firearms.”
Another longtime friend, Angie Bailey, said she has attended many of Buxton’s presentations about Tuskegee.
“Peter never finished a story without fighting back tears,” she said.
Buxton himself has played down his actions, saying he did not expect the strong reaction from some health officials when he began to question the ethics of the research.
At a forum at Johns Hopkins University in 2018, Buxton was asked where he got the moral strength to blow the whistle.
“It wasn’t strength,” he said. “It was stupidity.”
Associated Press writers Edith M. Lederer in New York and Kim Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed to this report. Lederer was a friend of Peter Buxton for more than 50 years and contributed to AP reporting on the Tuskegee study.
