William Carter Jenkins

Abstract

Epidemiologist and whistleblower on notorious Tuskegee study. Born July 26, 1945, in Mount Pleasant, SC, USA, he died of complications of sarcoidosis on Feb 17, 2019, in Charleston, SC, USA, aged 73 years. In 1968, William Jenkins, then a statistician at the US Public Health Service, was serving as the editor of a newsletter on health disparities when he heard from a doctor about a study taking place in Macon County, AL, USA. Since 1932, Jenkins learned, the US Government had been running an experiment on African American men infected with syphilis. Physicians told the men they were being treated for the infection, but in reality they were simply being observed as their symptoms evolved and their lives decayed. When Jenkins approached his supervisor with the revelation, he was told to let the matter lie. He later learned that the supervisor was helping to run the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which finally ended in 1972. Jenkins devoted the rest of his career to trying to help the survivors of the Tuskegee study and their families—and to ameliorate disparities, particularly racial inequalities in health. For Jenkins, the central lesson of the Tuskegee study was not that it was a shameful anomaly of medical history, but that it was likely to repeat itself. “To understand the Tuskegee study is to understand health research in America today”, he told the American Public Health Association (APHA) in a 2010 interview. “It was the most unethical study in American history, denying medical treatment to 399 men infected with syphilis for 40 years. It presents what happens when researchers and institutions come to believe that publications and programs are more important than people. While many people will say that this study could not happen again, by doing so, they lay the ground for history to repeat itself.” Jenkins helped establish several bodies devoted to reducing disparities in health care, including the Public Health Sciences Institute at his alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA, Project Imhotep, which seeks to attract under-represented minorities to public health, and the Society for the Analysis of African American Public Health Issues. Sherman A James, a social epidemiologist, and the Susan B King Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, in Durham, NC, called himself a “great admirer” of Jenkins. “He was persistent, and persistence pays off”, said James, who knew Jenkins when he was a doctoral student in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) in the 1970s and James was on the faculty there. “Bill was instrumental in the early 1990s in persuading the American Public Health Association to take the problem of racism more seriously as a public health issue”, James said. “His voice and his advocacy were extremely important.” Victor Schoenbach, associate professor of epidemiology at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC, worked with Jenkins at UNC and was a personal friend. “He was enormously successful” in two regards: convincing the public health establishment to consider disparities a core issue and increasing the number of African Americans and other minorities entering the field. “African Americans were not made to feel welcome in the public health profession. When Bill went to get a physical exam [for the US Public Health Service] they called security” because the secretary did not believe a black man could be a medical professional, he said. Jenkins attended Morehouse College, receiving his undergraduate degree in mathematics in 1967. He received two masters degrees, one in biostatistics from Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, in 1974, and one in public health from UNC in 1977. He earned his doctoral degree in epidemiology from UNC in 1983. Jenkins was on the faculty of Morehouse College, where, in 1995, he established the school's master of public health programme; he also served as the associate director of Morehouse's Research Center on Health Disparities. Earlier in his career, Jenkins worked at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, and led the agency's efforts on preventing the disease in minorities. For nearly a decade, he directed the US Government's Participants Health Benefits Program that provided assistance to Tuskegee survivors and their families. In 2017, Jenkins received the Hildrus Augustus Poindexter Award from the National Black Caucus of Health Workers of the APHA. In his acceptance speech, he spoke about the “need to take a more systematic and scientific approach to understanding these health differences than we've been able to do in the past”. Jenkins is survived by his wife Diane Rowley, an Emeritus Professor of the Practice of Public Health at UNC with training in paediatrics and preventive medicine, and his daughter, Danielle Rowley-Jenkins.