 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. It had started in 1932. Federal scientists recruited hundreds of black men from Tuskegee and rural Macon County, Alabama. They offered free meals, free checkups.