Tuskegee Experiments Leak Published (1972)

Tue Jul 25, 1972

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Image: A white doctor draws blood from one of the Tuskegee test subjects [Wikipedia]

On this day in 1972, whistleblower Peter Buxtun, a social worker and epidemiologist, leaked the story of the Tuskegee Experiments to the Washington Star, leading to a national scandal and the study’s quick termination.

The “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”, more commonly known as the Tuskegee Experiments, was an unethical study done by United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), where black study participants were not told of their syphilitic condition, given toxic treatments, and falsely told they were receiving free healthcare from the federal government. Lasting from 1932 until 1972, all of its participants were poor, rural black men with very limited access to health information.

In November 1966, Buxtun had filed an official protest on ethical grounds with the PHS’s “Division of Venereal Diseases” and another protest in November 1968, however his concerns were dismissed both times. In 1968, black statistician and PHS employee William Carter Jenkins also called for an end to the study in his magazine The Drum.

It wasn’t until Buxtun leaked the story to the Washington Star that the study became public knowledge and a national scandal. 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.

The Tuskegee Experiments were not the only syphilis experiments performed by the U.S. government against non-white people - from 1946 to 1948, the U.S. conducted a similar study in Guatemala in which doctors infected soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, without the informed consent of the subjects, leading to at least 83 deaths.

The Guatemalan experiments were led by physician John Charles Cutler, who also participated in the late stages of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Cutler never faced criminal charges for his actions.