“No power on Earth can give you back the lives lost, the pain suffered, the years of internal torment and anguish,” Mr. Clinton said. “What the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry.”
The apology is commemorated every year at the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care at Tuskegee University; the government paid for the center as part of the apology, and Dr. Jenkins helped establish it.
“The government was at the epicenter of the Tuskegee study, and Bill Jenkins had the courage to bring forth his ethical concerns while he was still a government employee,” Dr. Reuben Warren, director of the bioethics center, said in a telephone interview.
“He spoke truth to power,” he said.
William Carter Jenkins was born on July 26, 1945, in Mt. Pleasant, S.C. His father, Albert Daniel Jenkins, was a funeral home director and restaurant owner; his mother, Martha (Wilson) Jenkins, was a schoolteacher.
He graduated from historically black Morehouse College with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1967. He went to work for the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the public health service, and became one of the first black commissioned officers in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.
After the Tuskegee study was exposed, he was determined to make more of a difference in the world and decided he needed more training. He earned his master’s of science degree in biostatistics in 1974 at Georgetown University. He was awarded a second master’s, in public health, in 1977 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he went on to earn a doctorate in epidemiology in 1983.
He married Dr. Rowley that year. They had met at the C.D.C., where they were both epidemiologists. In addition to his wife, Dr. Jenkins is survived by their daughter, Danielle Rowley-Jenkins. His brother, Dr. Albert Daniel Jenkins Jr., died in 2006.
