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.
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