CDC leaders rejected his complaints and his call for the men in Tuskegee to be treated.
Peter Buxtun is pictured in San Francisco in this undated photo. Buxton, the whistleblower who revealed that the U.S. government allowed hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama go untreated for syphilis in what became known as the Tuskegee study, died on May 18, 2024, from Alzheimer's disease in Rocklin, Calif. Peter Buxtun, the whistleblower who revealed that the U.S.
Forty years earlier, in 1932, federal scientists began studying 400 Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, who were infected with syphilis. When antibiotics became available in the 1940s that could treat the disease, federal health officials ordered that the drugs be withheld. The study became an observation of how the disease ravaged the body over time.
Buxtun had a different reaction. After learning more about the study, he raised ethical concerns in a 1966 letter to officials at the CDC. In 1967, he was summoned to a meeting in Atlanta, where he was chewed out by agency officials for what they deemed to be impertinence. Repeatedly, agency leaders rejected his complaints and his call for the men in Tuskegee to be treated.
“We are thankful for his honesty and his courage,” said Lille Tyson Head, whose father was in the study. “Peter’s life experiences led him to immediately identify the study as morally indefensible and to seek justice in the form of treatment for the men. Ultimately, he could not relent,” said the CDC’s Pestorius.
He also spent more than 20 years trying to recover his family’s properties confiscated by the Nazis and was partly successful.
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