Peter Buxtun, who has died aged 86, was the whistleblower who exposed America’s most infamous medical research scandal, a 40-year federal experiment conducted on 399 black men with syphilis to see what would happen if the disease were left untreated.

“The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” had been started in 1932 by the US Public Health Service in Tuskegee, Alabama, which then had the highest rate of syphilis in the United States. 600 black patients (including a syphilis-free control group of 201) were promised free meals, medical care and burial insurance if they participated in a mysterious study and allowed their bodies to be autopsied.

The patients with syphilis were not told of their diagnosis, just that they had “bad blood”. Later, they were not offered penicillin, even though by 1943 this had been found to be an effective cure. When 256 of the infected patients were diagnosed with syphilis by the Armed Forces on being drafted in the Second World War, their treatment was blocked at the request of the scientists.

The study – later characterised in the 1980 book Bad Blood as “the longest non-therapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history” – was no secret in the medical world, and had already been cited in a dozen journals (albeit with the patients misleadingly referred to as “volunteers”) when Buxtun got wind of it in 1965.

He was working as a contact tracer for syphilis and gonorrhea in San Francisco for the Public Health Service, so...

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