 On July 25, 1972, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study became public with an Associated Press story written by Jean Heller. Her insider information came from Peter Buxtum, a law student friend and former Public Health Service (PHS) venereal disease interviewer.
The white and black news media, politicians, and the public, were outraged. Action was demanded with assurances that the U.S. government would never again sanction such cruelty.
The Nixon Administration and a Democratic-led Congress hemmed and hawed until Senator Ted Kennedy held hearings and Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) official Merlin K. DuVal, M.D., assistant secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs, appointed a nine-member panel to investigate the study.
Although the ad-hoc panel set guidelines to regulate human medical experimentation in the U.S., the panel was terribly flawed.
In her detailed history book, Medical Apartheid, author Harriet A. Washington reveals astounding information about the ad hoc panel, which consisted of five black men and four white men.
They degenerated into a “grimly self-destructive brawl that has never before been made public,” she wrote.
 Washington describes the ad-hoc group as “a nine-member panel of esteemed professionals whose dissection of the study [Tuskegee Syphilis Study] quickly degenerated into inefficiency, shouting matches, political infighting, accusations of a government cover-up, and the appalling destruction of key evidence.”
Heading the panel as chair was the Negro educator Broadus Butler, Ph.D., president of Dillard University and a former Tuskegee Airman.
Other blacks on the panel were physicians, a scientist, and Ron Brown, then a lawyer for the Urban League who later engineered Bill Clinton’s successful run into the White House, and then became his Secretary of Commerce.
In the book, Sister Washington laments that because the panel lacked a historian, “it was hampered in discerning and interpreting the veins of truth trickling through the heaps of documents the government provided and in seeking out other crucial information.”
Sister Washington charges that the panel “addressed the wrong ethical question.”
She exclaims the historian’s perspective: “The pertinent issue was not whether the men [the 600 black men experimented on in the 40-year Tuskegee Syphilis Study] had been duly informed of the experiment’s danger, but that the men had never been informed that they were in an experiment at all.”
Washington brings the reader back to the original deception.
“They thought they were only receiving treatment, yet the committee seemed not to understand this,” Washington wrote.
Chairman Butler even allowed Health, Education and Welfare to continue the experiment, even though the panel had given instructions to have it stopped. It took a heated battle within the panel to have the agency finally comply.
After the panel issued a watered-down report, at Chairman Butler’s insistence, Allen Brandt, a Columbia University graduate student, found boxes of Tuskegee Syphilis Study documents in the National Archives.
“Upon reading these, he realized that the panel had completely misunderstood the study’s nature,” Washington wrote.
Brandt wrote a paper, “clearly tracing the study’s history and criticizing the panel for having failed to obtain the historical information necessary to judge the study for what it was – experimental exploitation of the unwitting,” Washington reports.
In an interview with Dr. Jay Katz, one of the surviving panel members, Sister Washington wrote, “Brandt’s work made it painfully clear, says Katz, that the panel had been sabotaged by the government staff they relied on for information.”
According to the book, Katz sent Senator Kennedy a letter of complaint, charging a cover-up and urging an investigation.
“Kennedy’s office determined that there had been no cover-up,” Washington wrote.
To clearly show that white nationalism is the law, Harriet A. Washington wrote the following: “No news accounts have censured or even identified the scores of white AMA [American Medical Association] members at a 1965 meeting where the Tuskegee Syphilis Study was reported upon in great detail. For that matter, the PHS physicians responsible for the study have never been charged or punished.”
Next week: All praises due
“The Queen of Truth!”
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Pictured above is Harrriet A. Washington, a visiting scholar at Tuskegee University’s National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care. Washington analyzes the treatment of African Americans by some medical researchers in her new book, Medical Apartheid.
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