PHILADELPHIA—For two decades, a doctor at the
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine transformed a Philadelphia
penitentiary into his personal laboratory. Albert Kligman, a world-famous
dermatologist, conducted hundreds of experiments on inmates behind the walls of
Holmesburg prison before a public outcry shut down his operation in 1974.
Kligman’s studies ranged from the seemingly harmless—tests of toothpaste,
shampoo, and deodorant—to the obviously risky, putting dioxin on prisoners’
faces and having them consume mind-altering drugs. Along the way, he made
millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical companies that financed his
experiments.
One of Kligman’s guinea pigs was Leodus Jones. When
he crossed paths with Kligman in the 1960s, Jones was young and desperate for
bail money. He could earn a mere 15 cents a day performing menial prison jobs
like sewing trousers. Or he could become a test subject. Jones decided to join
four experiments and earned close to $100 for letting researchers test
chemicals on his feet, legs, arms, and back. Light and dark marks covered his
body for several years afterward. Three decades later, Jones, now 55, still
wonders what exactly he was exposed to and how it may have affected his and his
children’s health.
Now, a recently released exposé has sparked new interest
in this controversial chapter of American medical history. Allen Hornblum’s Acres
of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison; A True Story of Abuse and
Exploitation in the Name of Medical Science is the first in-depth account
of what may have been the nation’s busiest human laboratory. Like Miss Evers’
Boys, the recent film about the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, Acres of Skin
calls attention to the shocking forms that medical research has taken over the
years. In the wake of this book’s publication, the ACLU’s Pennsylvania chapter
is considering filing a lawsuit on behalf of those who participated in the
Holmesburg experiments.
The villain in Acres of Skin is Kligman, best
known for creating the skin cream Retin A, which he tested on Holmesburg
prisoners. Prison officials initially recruited the dermatologist to help with
an outbreak of athlete’s foot. But when Kligman walked into Holmesburg, “All I
saw before me were acres of skin,” Kligman told a reporter in 1966. “It was
like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.”
With easy access to this 1200-plus inmate population,
Kligman had no trouble finding cheap volunteers for medical trials--or
companies willing to pay him to test their products. Most inmates agreed to
participate in the experiments, which generated millions of dollars in revenue
for Kligman and the University of Pennsylvania. Kligman’s long list of clients
included Pfizer, Helena Rubenstein, Johnson & Johnson, R. J. Reynolds
Tobacco, and the U.S. Army.
Former inmates say the most common experiment was the
“patch test.” Researchers marked a gridon prisoners’ backs and applied
different lotions and ointments in each box. Then they stuck adhesive strips
and gauze pads on the men’s backs. “Guys looked like zebras when the
patchescame off,” a retired guard recalls in Acres of Skin. Today, at
neighborhood pools in Philadelphia, former Holmesburg inmates can still
identify one another by the designs on their backs.
Ugly scars were hardly the only side effects of
Kligman’s studies. When Roy Williams agreed to test shampoo, his hair started
falling out. “I didn’t really have a dandruff problem, but I did after that
test,” Williams said to Hornblum.”The lotion removed my hair and anything else
on my head.”
Researchers told inmates little about the
experiments. So prisoners quizzed fellow inmates who worked with the doctors in
order to learn which tests were safest. Word on the prison grapevine was that
Kligman’s most dangerous studies took place inside the trailers parked at the prison.
There, Kligman tested mind-altering drugs for the U.S. Army--even though this
was far outside his specialty of dermatology.
One test subject was Johnnie Williams. Researchers
gave him an injection, put him in a padded cell, and videotaped him. “Almost
immediately I felt affected,” Williams says in Acres of Skin. “I couldn’t
control myself and I told them to get this shit out of me.”
Williams began hallucinating. He ripped the toilet
out of the floor and the cell door off its hinges. The drug’s effects lasted
for years, Williams believes. “I had been a guy who tried to avoid arguments,”
he told Hornblum, “but after the tests . . . I went from petty thievery and
busting into cars to shootings and assaults. I had major problems after the
tests. [They] made me violent.”
Hornblum first learned about Kligman’s experiments in
1971, when he was a 23-year-old literacy instructor at Holmesburg. He still
remembers the shock he felt as he watched inmates walking around with gauze
stuck to their backs. “You had an incarcerated population in a totalitarian
atmosphere,” Hornblum said in a recent interview. “The prison population at
that point was overwhelmingly African American--about 85 per cent--and the
education level was pitiful. You didn’t have to be a bioethicist to know this
is a recipe for disaster.”
Still haunted by his memories of Holmesburg more than
20 years later, Hornblum decided to investigate. A longtime prison reform
advocate, Hornblum was working as the chief of staff in the city sheriff’s
office in 1993. He quit his job, moved in with his mother, and began making
daily trips to the University of Pennsylvania’s medical library.
The Holmesburg experiments were difficult to
research, however. For starters, Kligman had destroyed all his records after
national publicity led to the closing of his laboratory. Jessica Mitford’s 1973
exposé, Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business, led to a ban on
the nationwide practice of using inmates as guinea pigs. When Hornblum decided
to dig up the truth about Kligman’s involvement, he found dozens of former
inmates who wanted to talk but knew virtually nothing about what they had been
exposed to. And when Hornblum phoned doctors who had worked for Kligman, almost
all of them hung up or cursed him out.
Eventually, by combining inmate interviews with
documents he got under the Freedom of Information Act, Hornblum was able to
piece together Acres of Skin. Still, he wonders how much has yet to be
uncovered. Bernard Ackerman, who studied under Kligman and now heads the
Institute for Dermatopathology at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Medical College,
believes there is much more to this tale. “Hornblum really only scratched the
surface, but through no fault of his own,” Ackerman says. “He got no
cooperation.”
Near the end of his reporting, Hornblum telephoned
Kligman, who is now 82 and a professor emeritus at the University of
Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Kligman spoke for only 20 minutes before
cutting off the interview. “All we did . . . is offer them money for a little piece
of their skin,” Kligman said. He insisted his tests were innocuous, railed
against the “liberals” and “do-gooders” who had opposed him, and bashed critics
who compared his prison experiments to the work of Nazi doctors. “I’m Jewish!”
he said. “It struck me as ludicrous and incredible that I’d be compared to
that.”
The University of Pennsylvania released a statement
defending Kligman’s work, which read in part, “In the 1950s and 1960s, the use
of willing, compensated prisoners for biomedical research was a commonly
accepted practice by this nation’s scientists.” Nevertheless, Hornblum opens Acres
of Skin with the Nuremberg Code, which was written after the Holocaust to
ensure that doctors never again exploited powerless populations in the name of
medical advancement. “What took place at Holmesburg is not on the same plane as
what took place at Auschwitz, but it is on the same continuum,” Hornblum says.
At Holmesburg, “they weren’t using kids at fancy prep schools. They weren’t
using the string section of the Philadelphia orchestra. They were using
prisoners like lab rats. The inmates were brought out for a short period of
time, they were experimented on, and then they were forgotten about.”
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