Twenty years ago Peter Buxtun, a public health official working for the United States Public Health Service, complained to a reporter for the Associated Press that he was deeply concerned about the morality of an ongoing study being sponsored by the Public Health Service--a study compiling information about the course and effects of syphilis in human beings based upon medical examinations of poor black men in Macon County, Alabama. The men, or more accurately, those still living, had been coming in for annual examinations for forty years. They were not receiving standard therapy for syphilis. In late July of 1972 the Washington Star and the New York Times ran front-page ...