For 40 years starting in 1932, medical workers in the segregated South withheld treatment for Black men who were unaware they had syphilis, so doctors could track the ravages of the illness and dissect their bodies afterward.

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Exposing the Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The 50th anniversary
For 40 years starting in 1932, medical workers in the segregated South withheld treatment for Black men who were unaware they had syphilis, so doctors could

Tuskegee Syphilis Study

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Study termination


Peter Buxtun, a PHS venereal disease
investigator, the whistleblower


Group of Tuskegee Experiment test subjects

Several men employed by the PHS, namely Austin V. Deibert and Albert P. Iskrant, expressed criticism of the study, on the grounds of immorality and poor scientific practice. The first dissenter against the study who was not involved in the PHS was Count Gibson, an associate professor at the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. He expressed his ethical concerns to PHS’s Sidney Olansky in 1955.

Another dissenter was Irwin Schatz, a young Chicago doctor only four years out of medical school. In 1965, Schatz read an article about the study in a medical journal and wrote a letter directly to the study's authors confronting them with a declaration of brazen unethical practice. His letter, read by Anne R. Yobs, one of the study's authors, was immediately ignored and filed away with a brief memo that no reply would be sent.

In 1966, Peter Buxtun, a PHS venereal-disease investigator in San Francisco, sent a letter to the national director of the Division of Venereal Diseases expressing his concerns about the ethics and morality of the extended U.S. Public Health Service Syphilis Study at Tuskegee. The CDC, which by then controlled the study, reaffirmed the need to continue the study until completion; i.e. until all subjects had died and been autopsied. To bolster its position, the CDC received unequivocal support for the continuation of the study, both from local chapters of the National Medical Association (representing African-American physicians) and the American Medical Association (AMA).

In 1968, William Carter Jenkins, an African-American statistician in the PHS and part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), founded and edited The Drum, a newsletter devoted to ending racial discrimination in HEW. In The Drum, Jenkins called for an end to the study. He did not succeed; it is not clear who read his work.

Buxtun finally went to the press in the early 1970s. The story broke first in the Washington Star on July 25, 1972, reported by Jean Heller of the Associated Press. It became front-page news in the New York Times the following day. Senator Edward Kennedy called Congressional hearings, at which Buxtun and HEW officials testified. As a result of public outcry, the CDC and PHS appointed an ad hoc advisory panel to review the study. The panel found that the men agreed to certain terms of the experiment, such as examination and treatment. However, they were not informed of the study's actual purpose. The panel then determined that the study was medically unjustified and ordered its termination.

In 1974, as part of the settlement of a class action lawsuit filed by the NAACP on behalf of study participants and their descendants, the U.S. government paid $10 million ($51.8 million in 2019) and agreed to provide free medical treatment to surviving participants and surviving family members infected as a consequence of the study. Congress created a commission empowered to write regulations to deter such abuses from occurring in the future.

A collection of materials compiled to investigate the study is held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.

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AP exposes the Tuskegee Syphilis Study: The 50th Anniversary



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This 1950's photo made available by the National Archives shows a man included in a syphilis study in Alabama. For 40 years starting in 1932, medical workers in the segregated South withheld treatment for Black men who were unaware they had syphilis, so doctors could track the ravages of the illness and dissect their bodies afterward. (National Archives via AP)

By JEAN HELLER
Published 8:52 AM EDT, July 25, 2022

WASHINGTON (AP) — EDITOR’S NOTE — On July 25, 1972, Jean Heller, a reporter on The Associated Press investigative team, then called the Special Assignment Team, broke news that rocked the nation. Based on documents leaked by Peter Buxtun, a whistleblower at the U.S. Public Health Service, the then 29-year-old journalist and the only woman on the team, reported that the federal government let hundreds of Black men in rural Alabama go untreated for syphilis for 40 years in order to study the impact of the disease on the human body. Most of the men were denied access to penicillin, even when it became widely available as a cure. A public outcry ensued, and nearly four months later, the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” came to an end. The investigation would have far-reaching implications: The men in the study filed a lawsuit that resulted in a $10 million settlement, Congress passed laws governing how subjects in research studies were treated, and more than two decades later President Bill Clinton formally apologized for the study, calling it “shameful.”

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