For four decades, the United States government enrolled hundreds of Black men in Alabama in a study on syphilis, just so they could document the disease’s ravages on the human body.
SOUTHPORT, N.C. — Jean Heller was toiling away on the floor of the Miami Beach Convention Center when an Associated Press colleague from the opposite end of the country walked into her workspace behind the event stage and handed her a thin manila envelope.
“I thought, ‘It couldn’t be,’” Heller recalls of that moment, 50 years ago. “The ghastliness of this.”Lederer was working at the AP bureau there in 1968 when she met Peter Buxtun. Three years earlier, while pursuing graduate work in history, Buxtun had taken a job at the local Public Health Service office in 1965; he was tasked with tracking venereal disease cases in the Bay Area.
During a recent interview at her North Carolina home, Heller recalled putting the leaked PHS documents in her briefcase. She says she didn’t get around to reading the contents until the flight back to Washington. She even reached out to her mother’s gynecologist, a “straight down the line, middle of the road, superior doctor.”
They found an obscure medical journal — Heller can’t recall the title — that had been chronicling the study’s “progress.” Arrowsmith suggested they offer the story first to the now-defunct Washington Star, if it promised to run it on the front page.
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