Peter Buxtun, a social worker and epidemiologist hired by the U.S. Public Health Service in December 1965, learned that the agency was conducting the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In November 1966, he filed an official ethical protest with the Service’s Division of Venereal Diseases, but officials rejected it because they said the experiment was not complete. Buxtun filed a second protest in November 1968, warning that the study was also politically volatile; officials again ruled his concerns irrelevant. The source describes the program as a decades-long government action that President Bill Clinton later called “shameful” and “clearly racist.”
In 1972, Buxtun leaked information to Associated Press reporter Jean Heller. Heller’s exposé appeared in the Washington Star on July 25, 1972, and reached the front page of The New York Times the next day. Senator Ted Kennedy then called congressional hearings, where Buxtun and U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare officials testified. The study was terminated shortly afterward. In 1997, Clinton invited surviving participants to the White House and issued a formal presidential apology; the episode remains a defining example of institutional concealment and the failure of government medical oversight.
