 So, Debbie, Peter Buxton drew public attention to one of the most notorious medical experiments in U.S. history. How did he come to know about it? Well, in the 1960s, Buxton was a federal public health worker in San Francisco working on a completely different medical subject. But he overheard a coworker talking about the study. That study was officially called the Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Man.