Peter Buxtun, Tuskegee syphilis study whistleblower, dies at 86

Peter Buxtun, a whistleblower who exposed and helped end the Tuskegee syphilis study, a four-decade experiment in which the U.S. Public Health Service used hundreds of Black men as human guinea pigs, died May 18 at a memory-care center in Rocklin, Calif. He was 86.

The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said his friend John Seidts, who helped look after Mr. Buxtun in recent years. His death, near Sacramento, was first reported Monday by the Associated Press, which in 1972 published the first news story prompted by Mr. Buxtun’s disclosures.

A former venereal disease investigator with the Public Health Service, Mr. Buxtun spent seven years trying to draw attention to the Tuskegee study, meeting with journalists, doctors, public health officials and anyone who would listen.

His efforts, and the reporting that he inspired, brought widespread attention to one of the country’s most notorious medical scandals, revealing how 399 Black men in the segregated South were exploited for a study in which their syphilis would be monitored but not treated.

The researchers never obtained informed consent from the men, who lived in and around Tuskegee, Ala., and were told that they were being treated for “bad blood.” Many of the participants were poor sharecroppers, lured by the promise of free meals, health exams and burial insurance.

As their condition worsened, the researchers took notes but failed to provide adequate treatment, withholding penicillin even after the antibiotic became a commonly used medication for the sexually transmitted disease.

A 1969 study by the National Communicable Disease Center, now known as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that seven of the participants “had died as a direct result of syphilis,” according to the original AP report on the experiment. Some participants unwittingly spread syphilis to their wives and children, expanding the reach of a disease that can wreak havoc on the heart, brain and other organs.

Mr. Buxtun’s revelations led to congressional hearings and a class-action lawsuit, settled for $10 million, on behalf of the study participants and their heirs. The experiment was finally halted in late 1972, and a national commission was created to set guidelines for studies using human subjects.

“It would be difficult to name a figure in the history of American medical ethics whose actions have been more consequential than Buxtun’s,” wrote Carl Elliott, a philosopher and bioethics specialist, in his 2024 book “The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No.” “Yet most ethicists have never heard of him, and many accounts of the Tuskegee scandal do not even mention his name.”

Although he was not referenced in the original AP article, Mr. Buxtun’s story was told through histories of the Tuskegee experiment by James H. Jones and Susan M. Reverby, who noted that in some respects he was an unlikely candidate to blow the whistle.

Mr. Buxtun was based not in Tuskegee but in San Francisco, where he traced venereal diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis, tracking down patients at flophouses in the Tenderloin and urging them to get tested and treated. Far from a left-wing radical enmeshed in the counterculture, he was “a libertarian Republican, former army medic, gun collector, and NRA member,” Reverby noted in her 2009 book “Examining Tuskegee.”

“He was just irascible,” Reverby said in a phone interview, recalling how she once stayed at Mr. Buxtun’s home and spotted ammunition on the dining table. “He was a great raconteur — he told endless stories, he knew a million people.”

According to his friend Seidts, his tenacious opposition to the Tuskegee study was informed by his having seen a family member struggle with syphilis, which Mr. Buxtun never publicly discussed. “He witnessed firsthand the effects of tertiary syphilis,” Seidts said, “and it made a big impact on him. When he found out about this study he said, ‘This is not right.’”

Within the medical community, the Tuskegee program was not exactly a secret. More than a dozen articles about the study appeared in medical journals, although participants were often misleadingly described as “volunteers.” Mr. Buxtun first learned about the study in 1965, not long after he joined the Public Health Service, when he overheard a colleague talking about a physician who was chastised by the CDC for having “spoiled” a Tuskegee patient by treating him for syphilis.

Stunned by the disclosure that the agency seemed to be tolerating syphilis in one area even as it dispatched investigators to fight the disease in another, Mr. Buxtun called up a CDC public relations official, asking for information.

“Damned if I didn’t get — and I’ve still got it — a brown manila envelope,” he told Elliott in an interview. The package contained about 10 “roundup” reports, detailing subjects’ health and the progress of the disease. Mr. Buxtun concluded that the experiment was “an autopsy-oriented study. They wanted these guys dead on a pathology table.”

Mr. Buxtun, the son of a Czech Jewish father and Austrian Catholic mother, had studied German history in graduate school before joining the Public Health Service. He thought the Tuskegee study contained echoes of the human experimentation conducted by Nazi doctors during World War II, and prepared a report highlighting the parallels between the two.

His boss was furious.

“When they come to fire you, or do whatever they’re going to do, forget my name,” he recalled his supervisor saying. “I’ve got a wife and a couple of kids. I want to keep my job.”

Mr. Buxtun continued to press the issue, sending a letter to the head of the CDC’s venereal disease division in 1966. He was summoned to a meeting with agency officials in Atlanta, where he said he received “a proper tongue-lashing” from John C. Cutler, a leader of the Tuskegee study who argued, according to Mr. Buxtun, that the experiment was providing “a lot of valuable information” and was “going to be of great help to the Black race here in the United States.”

In 1968, months after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Buxtun sent another letter, reminding officials that the study’s participants were all Black and arguing that the experiment was “political dynamite and subject to wild journalistic misinterpretation.” A blue-ribbon panel was convened the next year to discuss the experiment and concluded that it was best to let the study continue.

By then, Mr. Buxtun had left the Public Health Service to attend Hastings law school, now the University of California College of the Law at San Francisco. But he continued to think of ways to raise ethical concerns about the study, and said he discussed possible legal options with his professors. Other whistleblowers, including public health statistician Bill Jenkins, also tried to sound the alarm to no avail.

Mr. Buxtun broke through in 1972, after he showed the manila envelope of roundup reports to his friend Edith Lederer, then a young reporter at the AP. From her, the documents made their way to investigative journalist Jean Heller. Her initial story on the Tuskegee experiment ran that July, appearing on the front page of the Washington Star before being picked up by newspapers around the country.

“It just blew the story wide open,” Mr. Buxtun recalled.

By then, only 74 of the study’s participants were still alive. There were only eight remaining by the time President Bill Clinton delivered a formal apology in 1997, calling the Tuskegee experiment “deeply, profoundly, morally wrong” and “clearly racist.” The study’s last survivor died in 2004.

Mr. Buxtun toggled between careers after leaving public health, working as an investor and antiques wholesaler. He also spent years trying — and succeeding, in part — to win back property the Nazis had seized from his family.

An only child, he was born Peter Jan Buxbaum in Prague on Sept. 29, 1937. (It was unclear when and why he changed his surname to Buxtun.) His mother was a homemaker, and his father was a chemist who worked at a family-run factory in the Czech town of Úpice, making lace doilies and other household items, according to his friend Seidts.

The family fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, making their way to England before immigrating to the United States, where they settled on a ranch in Oregon. Mr. Buxtun later studied political science at the University of Oregon, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1959. He served in the Army and trained as a psychiatric social worker before answering a recruitment ad for the Public Health Service.

He leaves no immediate survivors.

Mr. Buxtun occasionally lectured on the Tuskegee study, and could be wry and self-deprecating about his role in exposing the experiment. Elliott, whose book chapter on Mr. Buxtun first appeared as a 2017 article in the American Scholar, recalled telling the whistleblower how pleased he was to see that Mr. Buxtun had received a “Freedom of Information” prize from a California journalism group.

“Buxtun replied that he was not the only person honored that night,” Elliott wrote. “Then he added, ‘Another recipient was arrested the following week for public corruption and gun trafficking.’”