The Lab · 1966 to 1972 · The US Public Health Service
The Tuskegee study and Peter Buxtun: stay inside, or go to the press?
What now?
The case
Told from where the person who decided stood. In the game each line is written into a drawing as you tap.
- You work for the US Public Health Service. Over coffee, a colleague mentions a study in Alabama.
- Since 1932 the Service has followed 399 Black men who have syphilis. They were told they were being treated. They were not.
- Penicillin has cured syphilis since the 1940s. The men were never given it. The study is waiting to see what the disease does.
- You write to your superiors. They defend it. You write again. In 1969 a panel reviews the study and votes to go on.
The two calls
- Stay inside.Keep pressing through the proper channels. You keep your job, and the study keeps running.
- Go to the press.Give a reporter the documents. You have broken with the Service you work for.
Make the call in the game Free. No account. Two minutes.
What happened
Peter Buxtun went to the press. The story ran on 25 July 1972, six years after his first letter.
The study was stopped that year, forty years after it began. A federal panel called it ethically unjustified.
Hearings in Congress followed, and a lawsuit for the men and their families.
Source: US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The Tuskegee Timeline” and “Public Health Service Study of Untreated Syphilis at Tuskegee and Macon County, AL”. www.cdc.gov/museum/online/story-of-cdc/tuskegee/index.html
How to read this
History is not an answer key. This page says what was done and what came of it. Whether it was right is the question the case leaves with you.
Where the game asks it
The same kind of question runs through The Radio (When is a lie right?), one of the nine journeys of the game.
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All the rooms: the case files