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The person who blew the whistle on the study was Peter Buxtun, an epidemiologist employed by the U.S. Public Health Service. Reflecting on the Tuskegee study years later, he said, “I didn’t want to believe it. This was the Public Health Service. We didn’t do things like that.” A front-page headline on the July 26, 1972, issue of the New York Times announced, “Syphilis Victims in U.S. Study Went Untreated for 40 Years.” On November 16, 1972 — 40 years ago tomorrow — a memorandum from Assistant Secretary of Health Merlin DuVal ordered the termination of the Tuskegee study. (Prior to serving as assistant secretary of health, DuVal was also the founding dean, in 1964, of the University of Arizona College of Medicine.)

In addition to terminating the study, the federal government began paying reparations to the victims and their families. In a presidential apology 25 years later, Bill Clinton admitted that “[t]he United States government did something that was wrong — deeply, profoundly, morally wrong.” In spite of those acts, the legacy of the Tuskegee study persists. Although distrust of the medical establishment existed among blacks long before the study, a common view among researchers and health care providers is that revelations of the study’s unethical practices cemented that distrust. Suspicions about childhood vaccines and AIDS research and treatment, among other resistance to medical care and research, have been attributed to the study’s legacy.