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Hey, are you annoyed by acne? Have you heard that to stop pimples, you need to change your diet, by not eating things like chocolate? Well, here’s a fun fact: that’s a myth! It was actually debunked all the way back in 1965, when three researchers fed 65 acne-plagued teenagers candy bars and counting how many pimples they ended up with, finding that chocolate and fat had no impact on the progression of the acne. Two of those researchers went on to invent Retin-A, the medication for treating acne as well as potentially smoothing out wrinkles. Isn’t that interesting? Okay, now for a less fun fact: one of THOSE researchers was an absolute monster.
Today I want to tell you about Albert Kligman, a dermatologist who attended and then worked at University of Pennsylvania starting in the 1940s. He was a very smart and capable researcher who was focused on changing dermatology from a field where you just kind of describe what you’re looking at and take a guess on how to treat it, to a science-based field where hard research can inform better therapies. One of his earliest victories came in the form of treating ringworm, which despite its name is actually a fungus.
So far so good, right? Well. Because of his success treating ringworm, the authorities at the nearby Holmesburg Prison reached out to him for help stopping an epidemic of athlete’s foot, a similar fungal disease, amongst their prisoners. So Kligman went to the prison to get a tour and see what the issue was, and he was confronted with a sudden realization: this wasn’t a prison, but an enormous laboratory. Those weren’t prisoners, but lab rats. He later told a newspaper that “All I saw before me was acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.”
It’s worth noting that he started his experiments at Holmesburg in 1951, four years after the Nuremberg Code was created to establish ethical standards around human experimentation, in order to prevent anyone from doing what the Nazis did to their prisoners in concentration camps. Kligman, the son of Jewish immigrants, didn’t seem to take any notice.
And so he didn’t simply treat the prisoners for their athlete’s foot infections. Instead, he got his own block: H-Block, where prisoners could volunteer to be lab rats for the kingly sum of $1 to $2 a day, compared to other jobs that prisoners could do for only 15 cents a day. The prisoners were mostly poor, mostly Black, and mostly uneducated and had no idea what was being tested. Even years after the fact, men recalled only a vague understanding of what they were doing, like wearing a latex glove filled with dish detergent for 24 hours.
You may think, “Well, what’s the worst thing that could happen testing dermatological stuff?” And let me tell you: a lot. Take Kligman’s most famous invention, Retin-A: it was already considered a potential medication for acne by European scientists, but it’s extremely irritating to the skin so they didn’t think it was worth pursuing. So Kligman started smearing it on inmates, leading to “lots of skin peeling, open wounds and sores,” according to Lawrence O. Gostin, a law professor who is sad that Kligman ended up being so evil he ruined experimenting on prisoners for everyone.
So yeah, topical treatments can cause horrific side effects, but Kligman didn’t just stick to lotions and detergents. He accepted money from pharmaceutical companies, chemical companies, and government agencies to expose inmates to “radioactive, hallucinogenic and toxic materials,” as the New York Times wrote in his obituary. “In some experiments, prisoners were deliberately exposed to pathogens responsible for skin infections, including the herpes virus, staphylococcus bacteria and the athlete’s foot fungus, according to “Acres of Skin” (Routledge, 1998), a book by Allen M. Hornblum about the Holmesburg Prison research.”
Hornblum was an adult literacy instructor at the prison who was so horrified at the things he saw prisoners go through that he wrote that entire book and named it after the horrific quote Kligman said that aptly illustrated his dehumanization of the inmates. They weren’t people, just “acres of skin” to be used in experiments for things like dioxin, a key poison in Agent Orange that Dow Chemical paid him to paint on prisoners’ backs in 1966.
(Clip from NBC10 Philadelphia)
Kligman claimed that as far as he knew, none of the experiments affected the prisoners in the long term, but the prisoners say otherwise. Leodus Jones was in the prison awaiting trial for receiving stolen goods when he signed up for H-block trials in order to make bail and hire a lawyer. He and his family say he left with a scarred body and angry outbursts that made family life hell for his then-5-year old daughter, who ended up with her own troubled life. Because these experiments didn’t JUST affect those prisoners–they actually caused generational trauma that is still happening. Years later they both became activists for reform, and in 1986 Jones successfully sued the state of Pennsylvania for $40,000 for his suffering.
(Clip from an interview with Jones’s daughter)
Another nearly 300 former inmates tried to sue Kligman, UPenn, and Johnson & Johnson (who sells Retin-A) in 2000 but the case was dismissed for being past the statute of limitations. According to a Philadelphia Inquirer article, the survivors of Kligman are still seeking justice today, the 50th anniversary of the ending of the H-block experiments.
Kligman died in 2010 at the age of 93, after 50 years on the faculty of UPenn, still insisting he did nothing wrong. But don’t worry, he did face some consequences: in 1966 the FDA barred his research…for data discrepancies. That he blamed on the prisoners. The ban was soon lifted.
It’s always worth remembering that the scientific method is good and leads to the betterment of humanity, like acne creams and poison ivy remedies and athlete’s foot treatments. But science is a job that is done by humans, and we need to make sure that they aren’t doing evil shit to reach their goals.
