Peter Buxtun: US government employee who exposed racist and unethical Tuskegee syphilis study

In 1965 Peter Buxtun had just started working as a contact tracer with the Public Health Service (PHS) in San Francisco when he overheard colleagues talking about a syphilis study. Wanting to learn more, he called the PHS office in Atlanta, now part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A helpful clerk sent him a large manila envelope crammed with documents. The more Buxtun read, the more convinced he became that the study was racist, unethical, and immoral.

The PHS had launched the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male1 in 1932 in the Tuskegee area of Alabama, where the incidence of syphilis was high. It enrolled 399 infected men and 201 negative control participants, most of whom were illiterate farm workers. The study’s purpose was to observe the natural course of the disease at a time when treatment options were limited.

The PHS told the men that the study was about “bad blood,” not the fact that they were infected with a disease that, by the 1940s, was treatable with penicillin. They were promised medical exams, meals, and burial expenses but …