Peter Buxtun, who has died aged 86, was the whistleblower who exposed America’s most infamous medical research scandal, a 40-year federal experiment conducted on 399 black men with syphilis to see what would happen if the disease were left untreated.
“The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” had been started in 1932 by the US Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Alabama, which then had the highest rate of syphilis in the United States. 600 black patients (including a syphilis-free control group of 201) were promised free meals, medical care and burial insurance if they participated in a mysterious study and allowed their bodies to be autopsied.
The patients with syphilis were not told of their diagnosis, just that they had “bad blood”. Later, they were not offered penicillin, even though by 1943 this had been found to be an effective cure. When 256 of the infected patients were diagnosed with syphilis by the Armed Forces on being drafted in the Second World War, their treatment was blocked at the request of the scientists.
The study – later characterised in the 1980 book Bad Blood as “the longest non-therapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history” – was no secret in the medical world, and had already been cited in a dozen journals (albeit with the patients misleadingly referred to as “volunteers”) when Buxtun got wind of it in 1965.
He was working as a contact tracer for syphilis and gonorrhea in San Francisco for the Public Health Service, so when he heard anecdotally about a doctor who had being upbraided by the National Communicable Disease Center (CDC) for having “spoiled” a Tuskegee participant by treating him for syphilis, Buxtun was confused. Why was the disease being encouraged?
He requested details and was given a manila envelope of round-up reports. He realised that it was “an autopsy-oriented study. They wanted these guys dead on a pathology table.”
Buxtun did not fit the profile of a 1960s activist. Far from being on the radical Left, he was a libertarian Republican and an enthusiastic gun-owner. But he saw in Tuskegee echoes of Nazi human experiments during the Second World War, and his disgust was fuelled by having seen firsthand the agony of tertiary syphilis.
But his complaints fell on deaf ears within the CDC, and he was even dressed down by a Tuskegee study leader, who claimed it was “going to be of great help to the black race”. After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, Buxtun warned them that the experiment was “political dynamite”.
Buxtun eventually persuaded a reporter at Associated Press to investigate it, and the story broke in 1972, with consequences that were profound but not wholly positive.
On the one hand, the study was stopped and a class-action lawsuit awarded $10 million to the victims. By then, 128 test subjects had died of syphilis or related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children born with the disease.
A stricter code of medical ethics came into being, with a 1974 act that introduced the standard of informed consent. Experiments which orphanages and mental hospitals were permitting pharamaceutical companies to run on their patients were quickly shut down.
On the other hand, the Tuskegee scandal shattered black Americans’ trust in the medical establishment. A disinclination to seek treatment contributed to a worsening in black American life expectancy, which by 1980 was a year shorter than it had been in 1972.
Peter Jan Buxbaum was born in Prague on September 29 1937 to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother. After the Munich conference they settled in Oregon as flax-growers and staunch Republicans.
As an undergraduate, Peter studied Nazi medical war crimes, then served as a psychiatric social worker and combat medic in the Army; at some point he anglicised his surname.
In 1967 he left the Public Health Service to retrain as a lawyer, but remained haunted by Tuskegee.
He testifed at the 1972 congressional committee, and at the 1997 White House event when Bill Clinton made a public apology, Buxtun gave a speech, saluting Herman Shaw, the articulate spokesman of the Tuskegee test subjects, as “one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met”.
But Buxtun rejected the suggestion that he himself had done anything out of the ordinary, and for a long time refused to be called a “whistleblower”.
He also spent decades trying to recover family property in Europe that had been confiscated by the Nazis.
He leaves no immediate survivors.
Peter Buxtun, born September 29 1937, died May 18 2024
