A former venereal-disease investigator with the Public Health Service, Buxtun spent seven years trying to draw attention to the Tuskegee study, meeting with reporters, doctors, public health officials and anyone who would listen.
His efforts and the reporting he inspired brought attention to one of the nation’s most notorious medical scandals, revealing how 399 black men in the segregated South were exploited for a study in which their syphilis would be monitored but not treated.
The researchers never obtained informed consent from the men, who lived in and around Tuskegee, Alabama, and were told they were being treated for “bad blood.” Many of the participants were poor sharecroppers, lured by the promise of free meals, medical exams and funeral insurance.
As their condition worsened, researchers took notes but failed to provide adequate treatment, refusing to administer penicillin even after the antibiotic became a commonly used drug to treat the sexually transmitted disease.
A 1969 study by the National Communicable Disease Center, now known as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that seven of the participants “died as a direct result of syphilis,” according to the AP’s original report on the experiment. Some participants unwittingly passed syphilis to their wives and children, widening the reach of a disease that can wreak havoc on the heart, brain and other organs.
Mr. Buxtun’s revelations led to congressional hearings and a $10 million class-action lawsuit on behalf of study participants and their heirs. The experiment was eventually shut down in late 1972, and a national commission was established to establish guidelines for studies using human subjects.
“It would be difficult to name a figure in the history of American medical ethics whose actions have had more consequences than Buxtun’s,” wrote Carl Elliott, a philosopher and bioethicist, in his 2024 book The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No. “Yet most ethicists have never heard of him, and many accounts of the Tuskegee scandal do not even mention his name.”
Although he was not mentioned in the original AP article, Mr. Buxtun’s story was told through accounts of the Tuskegee experiment by James H. Jones and Susan M. Reverby, who noted that in some ways he was an unlikely candidate to be a whistleblower.
Mr. Buxtun was based not in Tuskegee but in San Francisco, where he tracked venereal diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis, tracking down patients in Tenderloin asylums and urging them to get tested and treated. Far from a left-wing radical mired in the counterculture, he was “a libertarian Republican, a former military doctor, a gun collector and an NRA member,” Reverby noted in his 2009 book “Examining Tuskegee.”
“He was just angry,” Reverby said in a telephone interview, recalling that she once stayed at Mr. Buxtun’s house and spotted ammunition on the dining table. “He was a great storyteller — he told endless stories, he knew a million people.”
According to his friend Seidts, his staunch opposition to the Tuskegee study was motivated by the fact that he had seen a family member struggle with syphilis, which Mr. Buxtun never spoke about publicly. “He saw firsthand the effects of tertiary syphilis,” Seidts said, “and it had a big impact on him. When he heard about this study, he said, ‘This is not good.’”
Within the medical community, the Tuskegee program was hardly a secret. More than a dozen papers about the study appeared in medical journals, though the participants were often misrepresented as “volunteers.” Buxtun first heard about the study in 1965, shortly after joining the Public Health Service, when he heard from a colleague about a doctor who had been reprimanded by the CDC for “spoiling” a Tuskegee patient by treating him for syphilis.
Stunned by the revelation that the agency appeared to tolerate syphilis in one region even as it sent investigators to fight the disease in another, Mr. Buxtun called a CDC public relations official to ask for information.
“I didn’t get — and I still do — a manila envelope,” he told Elliott in an interview. The package contained about a dozen “summary” reports, detailing the subjects’ health and disease progression. 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 an Austrian Catholic mother, had studied German history before joining the public health service. He believed the Tuskegee study contained echoes of human experiments conducted by Nazi doctors during World War II and wrote a report highlighting the parallels between the two.
“When they come to fire you or do anything else, forget my name,” he recalled his superior telling him. “I have a wife and two children. I want to keep my job.”
Mr. Buxtun continued to press the issue, sending a letter to the director of the CDC’s division of venereal diseases in 1966. He was summoned to a meeting with agency officials in Atlanta, where he said he received “a real admonition” from John C. Cutler, one of the leaders of the Tuskegee study, who argued, according to Mr. Buxtun, that the experiment provided “a lot of valuable information” and “was going to be a great help to the Negro race here in the United States.”
In 1968, a few months after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Buxtun sent another letter reminding officials that the study participants were all black and saying the experiment was “political dynamite and subject to journalistic misinterpretation.” A panel of experts was convened the following year to discuss the experiment and concluded that it was best to continue the study.
By then, Buxtun had left the public health service to attend law school at Hastings, now the University of California, San Francisco. But he continued to consider ways to raise ethical questions about the study and said he had discussed possible legal options with his professors. Other whistleblowers, including public health statistician Bill Jenkins, also tried to sound the alarm, but to no avail.
Mr. Buxtun broke through in 1972, after he showed the manila envelope containing the reports of the roundup to his friend Edith Lederer, then a young reporter at the AP. That’s when the documents reached investigative journalist Jean Heller. Her first story on the Tuskegee experiment was published in July of that year, making the front page of the Washington Star and being picked up by newspapers across the country.
“It just revealed the story,” Buxtun recalls.
At that point, only 74 of the study participants were still alive. Only eight remained when President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology in 1997, calling the Tuskegee experiment “deeply, profoundly, morally wrong” and “clearly racist.” The study’s last survivor died in 2004.
After leaving public health, Mr. Buxtun alternated between careers, working as an investor and an antiques wholesaler. He also spent years trying — and partly succeeding — to recover property that the Nazis had confiscated from his family.
An only child, he was born Peter Jan Buxbaum in Prague on September 29, 1937. (It is unclear exactly when or why he changed his last name to Buxtun.) His mother was a housewife, and his father was a chemist who worked in a family factory in the Czech town of Úpice, making lace doilies and other household goods, according to his friend Seidts.
The family fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and traveled to England before immigrating to the United States, where they settled on a ranch in Oregon. Mr. Buxtun later studied political science at the University of Oregon, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1959. He served in the Army and trained as a psychiatric social worker before answering a recruitment advertisement for the Public Health Service.
He left no immediate survivors.
Mr. Buxtun lectured on the Tuskegee study and could be wry and self-critical about his role in exposing the experiment. Elliott, whose book chapter on Mr. Buxtun first appeared in 2017 in American Scholar, recalled telling the whistleblower how pleased he was that Mr. Buxtun had received a Freedom of Information award from a California journalism group.
“Buxtun responded that he was not the only one honored that night,” Elliott wrote. “Then he added, ‘Another recipient was arrested the following week on charges of public corruption and arms trafficking.’”