Chilling Details About The Human Experiments At Holmesburg Prison
The people experimented on at Holmesburg Prison were subjected to practically every form of experimentation. Mind-altering drugs, cosmetics, viruses, and chemical warfare were all on the table when it came to human experimentation at Holmesburg. The people experimented on in the prison had very little choice or agency in the matter. Being a guinea pig meant making more money than was otherwise possible, and with doctors providing little-to-no information on the effects of the experiments, no one was able to make an informed decision.
The experiments at Holmesburg Prison lasted from 1951 to 1974, ending after public opinion started turning on the idea of experimenting on imprisoned people following the 1973 Congressional Hearing on Human Experimentation, but the damage was already done and many found themselves facing lifelong health problems due to the experiments they were subjected to at Holmesburg Prison.
One of the more horrifying things about the experiments at Holmesburg Prison is the fact that the doctor who started and ran the studies never saw anything wrong with what he was doing. Throughout his life, he defended his actions and lamented the concept of informed consent. Unfortunately, just because informed consent has become more widespread doesn't mean that imprisoned people aren't still being exploited . These are some chilling details about the human experiments at Holmesburg Prison.
What was Holmesburg Prison?
The Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was initially built in 1896 to serve as a county jail due to overcrowding at Philadelphia's Moyamensing Prison. Designed with the same layout of the Eastern State Penitentiary, the foundational mentality behind the prison was "separate penal confinement."
According to Hidden City , by the 1920s, Holmesburg already had a notorious reputation for brutality. Imprisoned people were kept in solitary confinement and only allowed 20 minutes of exercise per day. In 1922, the Evening Public Ledger described Holmesburg Prison as "the worst prison in the United States."
Holmesburg Prison made headlines in 1938 when four people imprisoned there were baked to death in a small concrete isolation block used for punishment known as the Klondike. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that on August 20, 1938, 23 people were locked inside the Klondike in response to a hunger strike that half of all the prisoners were participating in. As temperatures inside the Klondike rose to almost 200 degrees, by Monday morning many of the men were unconscious and four were dead.
Holmesburg Prison was closed in 1995, but Abandoned America writes that while it was open, it earned the nickname "The Terrordome."
Acres of skin
In 1951, Dr. Albert Kligman was working as a professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School when he was asked by prison officials at Holmesburg Prison to examine an outbreak of athlete's foot in the prison. According to Ampersand , Kligman was already known for his research in ringworm, which is a biological relative of the athlete's foot fungus tinea pedis.
Once there, Kligman's attention was attracted to something other than the athlete's foot he was supposed to be examining. The Mutter Museum writes that Kligman later told a Philadelphia newspaper reporter that "All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a field for the first time." Kligman also described the prison as an "'an anthropoid colony, mainly healthy' under perfect control conditions," per " Acres of Skin " by Allen M. Hornblum.
It didn't take long for Kligman to set up shop in Holmesburg Prison. In 1968, Kligman revealed that he "began to go to the prison regularly, although I had no authorization. It was years before the authorities knew that I was conducting various studies on prisoner volunteers. Things were simpler then. Informed consent was unheard of. No one asked me what I was doing. It was a wonderful time," per The Baltimore Sun .
A majority Black population
When the experiments first began, the pay was around $5 a test and for many imprisoned people there was no other way for them to make that kind of money. Initially, imprisoned Black people would protest that "only whites were on the tests, [and they] get all the money and we don't get anything," according to " Acres of Skin ." Those running the human experiments assured the imprisoned people that there would be no discrimination in testing and that anyone was welcome to participate, but "accusations circulated for years that black inmates were directed to the less desirable tests with lower pay."
When human experimentation started at Holmesburg Prison in the 1950s, imprisoned Black people were segregated in two of the cell blocks out of a total of ten. By the mid-1950s, imprisoned Black people were held three to a cell in three cell blocks and were close to making up 50% of the prison population. By the time the experiments reportedly ended in 1974, Black people made up almost 85% of Holmesburg Prison . At least 75% of the population at Holmesburg ended up being used in human experimentation.
The Boston College Law Review notes that most of the people imprisoned at Holmesburg were not yet convicted over a crime. "More than half of the inmates in Philadelphia prisons at the time were individuals awaiting trial or trying to make bail," Boston College Law Review explained.
Patch tests
Many different types of experiments were done on the people imprisoned at Holmesburg Prison but the most common tests were patch tests. The Baltimore Sun writes that patch tests involved separating out areas of a person's back with strips of hospital tape, dabbing lotion on each square, and then applying heat from a sunlamp. "Doctors checked the skin for peeling, burning and blistering at different temperatures," according to The Baltimore Sun.
According to " Acres of Skin ," the patch test was the first test that Withers Ponton (sometimes written Withers Pond) underwent. He said it "nearly killed me it was so painful. I nearly went through the wall. I had a patch put on my back that covered a large area. It was a 10-day test and I wasn't allowed to take a shower."
Both imprisoned people and guards at Holmesburg Prison maintained that it was possible to recognize someone who had been imprisoned at Holmesburg "by the distinctive scars from skin burns and patch tests." One guard described the imprisoned people as looking like zebras when the patches came off.
Ron Keenan, who is now imprisoned at Graterford Prison after spending 34 months in Holmesburg in the late 1960s, stated that he "look[s] like a checkerboard with patches and skin discoloration on my arms, back, and chest."
Dermatological testing
Some of the human experiments conducted at Holmesburg Prison were dermatological studies. Lotions like skin creams, moisturizers, and suntan lotions were tested on imprisoned people, according to The Baltimore Sun , in addition to foot powders, deodorant, detergents, and hair dye. " Acres of Skin " writes that even liquid eye drops and toothpaste were tested on imprisoned people. While some of the tests may have seemed benign at the time, they often involved other painful procedures, like biopsies.
Sometimes experiments would also be conducted on the imprisoned people that didn't involve dermatological products but were towards research for dermatological products. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that in 2022, it was revealed that Johnson & Johnson funded an experiment at Holmesburg Prison where imprisoned people were injected with asbestos "so the company could compare its effect on their skin versus that of talc, a key component in its iconic baby powder." Johnson & Johnson also funded a number of other experiments at Holmesburg Prison including testing toothpastes and mouthwashes for toxicity and a wound healing study that tested wound dressings.
At one point, Withers Pond also underwent something called a gauze test, which involves doctors making two 1-inch incisions on his lower back, inserting gauze pads into the wounds, and sewing up the wound. One of the gauze pads was removed 10 days after insertion and the other one 20 days after insertion, according to "Acres of Skin."
Chemical warfare testing
In the 1960s, Kligman and the University of Pennsylvania entered a $10,000 contract with Dow Chemical for a study to test dioxin on the people imprisoned at Holmesburg Prison. The New York Times reports that Dow Chemical ordered the tests after 49 employees at their herbicide plant in Midland, Michigan developed chloracne.
One of the tests conducted in 1966 involved putting 0.2 to 16 micrograms of dioxin, which is used to make Agent Orange and other herbicides, onto the foreheads of 60 imprisoned people. However, no one suffered any reactions. The following year, Kligman increased the dosage 468 times and applied 7,500 micrograms to the skins of 10 imprisoned people every other day for a month.
Eight people ended up with acne lesions and three people saw their lesions turn into inflamed blisters. These lesions took up to seven months to heal and Kligman also reportedly insisted that "no effort [should be] made to speed healing by active treatment," according to " Acres of Skin ."
Even the Dow scientists were "quite startled" when they learned of the dosage increase and ultimately this played a part in Dow Chemical deciding to end their relationship with Kligman.
Medical testing
Imprisoned people at Holmesburg Prison were also subjected to medical experimentation. In " Sentenced to Science ," Allen M. Hornblum writes that numerous people were given inoculations of the herpes, vaccinia, and wart viruses. One experiment involving wart viruses, herpes simplex, and herpes zoster was reserved for "healthy, colored, male volunteers" while another experiment called for "10 healthy white subjects."
" Acres of Skin " acknowledges that Kligman also did a number of experiments with ringworm. One involved applying "enormous quantities of fungi" to people's feet, and some were made to wear boots continuously for a week straight after being infected. Kligman reportedly noted that being able to experiment in a prison led him to have a newfound appreciation for ringworm.
Pharmaceutical companies would also test their new drugs in prison populations. The FDA required a three-phase testing process and imprisoned people "constituted nearly 100% of the Phase I experimental populations across the country." There were also tests comparable to the CIA's MK ULTRA . It's unclear if people were actually given LSD, but mind-altering drugs were repeatedly tested on imprisoned people. These experiments were often held in separate trailers and were associated with the US Army.
The business of exploitation
Dow Chemical and Johnson & Johnson weren't the only companies exploiting the people imprisoned at Holmesburg Prison. Dozens of companies took advantage and it wasn't just cosmetics companies. Pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Merck, Hoffman-Larouche, and Kline & French all reached out to Holmesburg Prison to conduct experiments for them, according to " Acres of Skin ."
Even R. J. Reynolds Tobacco and the US Army sponsored a number of experiments. The Alliance For Human Research Protection explains that one Army-funded experiment involved "the effects of poisonous vapors on the skin" and Kligman justified it by claiming that "this is a program for national defense." Many of the experiments funded by the US Army were similar to the ones conducted by the Army on soldiers at the Edgewood Arsenal .
According to Ethical Considerations for Research Involving Prisoners , between 1962 and 1966, at least 33 pharmaceutical companies alone tested up to 153 experimental drugs at Holmesburg Prison.
Dr. A. Bernard Ackerman, a dermatologist who worked at Holmesburg during the 1960s, stated that "what started as scientific research became pure business," per The New York Times .
Vaguely compensated
Considering that an imprisoned person working at Holmesburg Prison could only make around 20 cents a day, the money offered in exchange for human experimentation was incredibly tempting. Depending on the test, imprisoned people could make between $10 and $300 per test . " Acres of Skin " explains that at one point, the US Army funded an experiment that paid between $1,000 and $1,500.
Al Zabala, who was imprisoned at Holmesburg during the 1960s, recalls that "three or four tests at a time could mean real easy money. Foot powder tests and deodorants would bring you $100 per month, and hand creams a buck a day. You could be making $300 to $400 a month." For the patch test on his back, Withers Ponton received $10 or $15. As Boston College Law Review notes, because many of the people imprisoned at Holmesburg were trying to make bail, they "were so desperate for money that they signed up for Kligman's experiments in droves."
Although these people were technically being compensated, there was little-to-no informed consent. This was even recognized by the prison staff. Retired Captain Alex Gougnin recalled that "the inmates did not know what they were being exposed to. [And test administrators] didn't tell the inmates." Any consent forms that the people imprisoned at Holmesburg ended up signing — which they didn't always – would be filled with technical rhetoric that almost deliberately obfuscated the nature of the experiments and few understood what they were signing .
Permanent damage
Despite the fact that Kligman and the other doctors experimenting on imprisoned people at Holmesburg insisted there would be no long term effects from the experiments, many people report permanent damage from participating. In his testimony before the Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on crimes and corrections, Joseph Smith states that his skin remains discolored and insensitive to touch in the places where the patch test was administered on his arms, legs, and black. His teeth also started falling out in 1969 and he attributes his tooth loss to the toothpaste test from Holmesburg.
" Sentenced to Science " explains that many of the cosmetics, powders, and shampoos that were tested on imprisoned people caused baldness, extensive scarring, and permanent skin and nail injury. Others experienced inflammation after chemical exposures that have never subsided. Many also have a great deal of difficulty trusting doctors after their experience and will refuse to see a doctor even if they require medical attention.
Unfortunately, The Baltimore Sun reports that it's difficult to assess the cases of long-term injury from the human experimentation at Holmesburg because Kligman destroyed all the records when the program was terminated in 1974. Meanwhile, Kligman repeatedly insisted throughout his life that "I still don't see there having been anything wrong with what we were doing," per The New York Times .
Individual settlements
Several people who were imprisoned at Holmesburg Prison were able to reach individual settlements regarding the human experimentation that they were subjected to. In 1992, the University of Pennsylvania settled a $6 million lawsuit brought by Edward Farrington that charged that "he developed leukemia as a result of University workers injecting him with radioactive material during a 1967 prison experiment," writes The Daily Pennsylvanian . However, details of the settlement are unknown and the University made no admission of guilt in the settlement.
Another one of the few people imprisoned at Holmesburg who was able to reach a settlement was Leodus Jones, who received a $40,000 settlement in 1984 and bore lifelong scars from the experiment. Unfortunately, The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that "his subsequent effort to organize inmates for broader legal action fell apart." " Acres of Skin " shared that William Charles Smith also received an out-of-court settlement in 1984. August Sellitto, the city's legal representative, reportedly stated that "it would be very dangerous to put this case before a jury."
Filing a civil suit
In 2000, 298 people who were formerly imprisoned at Holmesburg Prison filed a civil group lawsuit for their long term injuries against Kligman, University of Pennsylvania, Johnson & Johnson, and Dow Chemical. According to The Pennsylvania Gazette , the lawsuit alleged that despite the fact that imprisoned people were paid for their participation, they were incredibly "underpaid and under-informed about the potential dangers."
The Daily Pennsylvanian reports that the case was brought to the Federal District Court, but the court deemed that the statute of limitations had passed. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals held up this decision stating that the plaintiffs had waited too long to sue and that "it is simply not reasonable to believe that plaintiffs were not aware of the facts underlying this litigation many, many years before bringing suit," per The Intelligencer .
But according to " Sentenced to Science ," after " Acres of Skin " was published in 1998, many people who'd been subjected to the human experimentation at Holmesburg Prison "realized for the first time that they had rights as experimental subjects" and could sue despite the vague papers they'd been forced to sign.
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A brief history of the Holmesburg Prison experiments
A timeline of the medical experiments at Holmesburg prison and the after effects on the inmates who participated.
The Holmesburg Prison experiments ended 50 years ago , but their impact remains with the victims and their families. A brief history of the experiments:
1951: Albert Kligman, a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist, begins experiments on people incarcerated at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia for such companies as Johnson & Johnson and Dow Chemical, as well as the U.S. Army, which commissioned Kligman to test hallucinogenic and psychotropic drugs. The Holmesburg testing program lasted 23 years.
1967: Kligman patents Retin-A, an acne medication. He and the University of Pennsylvania license it to Johnson & Johnson, which began selling it in 1971. A decade later, after discovering Retin-A’s anti-wrinkle use, Kligman is issued a new patent, but Penn argues that the right to license the patent belongs to the university. In 1989, an acrimonious lawsuit ensues, ending in 1992 with an agreement to share royalties with the medical school.
» READ MORE: Those affected by Holmesburg Prison experiments are still seeking justice, 50 years later
1972: The Associated Press reports on the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male , which began in 1932 and lasted 40 years. The reporting fuels a public outcry and a congressional hearing the following year.
1974: Philadelphia bans medical testing at Holmesburg.
1984: Leodus Jones, father of Adrianne Jones-Alston and founder of Community Assistance for Prisoners in Philadelphia, files a lawsuit seeking damages. He was one of the few incarcerated people to successfully sue, reaching a $40,000 settlement with the City of Philadelphia in 1986. Jones died in 2018.
1995: Holmesburg, which opened in 1896 for those serving short sentences or awaiting trial, closes.
1998: Allen M. Hornblum , who was director of adult literacy for Philadelphia prisons and became aware of the testing program, releases his book, “ Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison ,” which documented the horrors of the medical experiments.
2000: About 300 former Holmesburg study participants sue Kligman, Penn, the City of Philadelphia, Dow Chemical, and Johnson & Johnson for exposing them to “infectious diseases, radioactive isotopes, and psychotic drugs such as LSD without having given informed consent.” A year later, a court rules that the statute of limitations had expired.
2002: City Council holds a hearing on the medical experiments at Holmesburg.
2003: A group known as The Holmesburg Survivors protests outside the College of Physicians when it presents a lifetime achievement award to Kligman. The College of Physicians issues an apology 20 years later, in 2023.
2010: Kligman, 93, dies of a heart attack. He had been a member of Penn’s faculty for over 50 years.
2021: J. Larry Jameson, then the dean of Penn Medicine and now Interim President of the University of Pennsylvania, issues an apology, calling Kligman’s experiments “disrespectful.”
2022: Then-Mayor Jim Kenney follows with an apology from the city. “To the families and loved ones across generations who have been impacted by this deplorable chapter in our city’s history, we are hopeful this formal apology brings you at least a small measure of closure.”
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Justice Requires the Full Story
Holmesburg Prison’s medical experiments are Philadelphia’s ‘lasting shame’
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A crowd of students, professors, and community members gathered in a packed room at St. Joseph’s University on April 26 to hear about “Philadelphia’s lasting shame” from the people who are still living under the pain of it. That shame—the horrific medical experiments conducted by dermatologist Dr. Albert Kligman in Pennsylvania’s Holmesburg Prison for more than 20 years beginning in the 1950s—has received renewed attention in recent years. Yet, much remains to be done to fully redress the experiments’ harm and reckon with their legacy.
Featured on the panel were Irvin Moore, Herbert Rice, and Lavone Miller, all of whom survived the experiments. The panel also included Adrianne Jones-Alston, the daughter of a Holmesburg experiment participant, and Allen Hornblum, a writer and historian who was among the first to extensively research and expose the experiments.
Before sharing his experience during the April 26 panel, Irvin Moore declared slowly and assuredly, “This is the truth.” The assertion is important because, for decades, the story of Holmesburg went ignored in the medical halls that benefited from the experiments’ scientific findings, and until recently , went unacknowledged by the city of Philadelphia and some of its most powerful institutions.
Dr. Kligman may not be a household name today, but the products he developed are staples in the skincare and pharmaceutical industries. Perhaps the most well-known of these is the increasingly popular tretinoin, or Retin-A, a topical medication for acne that is also remarkably effective as an anti-aging treatment. But Kligman’s discoveries came on the backs of scores of incarcerated men—an overwhelming number of whom were Black—detained in Philadelphia’s now-shuttered Holmesburg Prison. Kligman’s development of Retin-A was directly made possible by the tests conducted on men imprisoned at Holmesburg. These men—and the family members to whom they returned upon their release–have maintained over decades that Dr. Kligman’s experimentation was tortuous, unethical, and that it forever changed their lives.
Amidst national conversations about reparations, attention has turned to Holmesburg and those who survived Kligman’s experiments. The St. Joseph’s panel is a part of this new reckoning and served as a space where survivors laid out renewed demands for institutions that allowed for and benefited from Kligman’s experiments, including the University of Pennsylvania. Survivors are also demanding that these institutions meaningfully acknowledge the harm they caused and reconsider whether the scientific community should celebrate Kligman. The enduring harm of the Holmesburg experiments helps us understand why ethical standards for medical experimentation in prisons and jails have shifted, while also triggering larger questions about the risks and benefits of continuing to allow clinical trials in the prison system.
“We didn’t know what was coming home to us”
Moore, who was ultimately incarcerated for over 50 years, first learned of the experiments and the financial opportunities they could provide when he arrived at Holmesburg in 1969. Moore explained that he was driven to participate because of the ethical codes that underpin prison life, which included supporting oneself. Experiments were a straightforward way to purchase commissary items, send funds back home, or raise bail money.
“I signed up for the tests because I wanted to stand on my own two feet,” Moore recalled during the panel.
Unbeknownst to him and the hundreds of other men who participated in the tests were the specifics of what they were being injected and slathered with or made to ingest. Moore explained that he asked test administrators whether the experiments would hurt him and he said he was assured that everything was safe. In hindsight, he says he was “naive enough to believe the powers that be.”
While Holmesburg is most widely associated with the development of Retin-A, many other products and chemicals were tested on incarcerated men at the facility through contracts with pharmaceutical companies and even the U.S. military. For example, both Moore and fellow panelist Herbert Rice—who was incarcerated at Holmesburg for two years—spoke of their participation in what was known as the “milkshake tests.” In one of the more lucrative experiments, the tests required living in an isolated cellblock and only eating a milkshake product (the ingredients of which were unknown to participants) three times a day for six months. While Moore remains unsure of what he was served, he believes that these may have been safety tests of the earliest versions of what are now known as protein shakes. In a 2021 profile written about the Holmesburg experiments , Yusef Anthony, a formerly incarcerated survivor of a handful of tests conducted at the prison, notes that these milkshake tests gave him hemorrhoids that forced him to undergo numerous operations to repair his rectum.
Rice also spoke of experiments that left him scarred both emotionally and physically. He recalled his skin feeling like leather for three to four months after “they put some kind of radiation on my back.” Another set of tests over a four-day observation period required ingesting pills filled with “some type of living organism.” Rice became deeply emotional when recounting the psychological torment he endured long after his incarceration ended. He traces recurring night terrors he experienced for decades back to the experiments he underwent. In the mid-90s, while seeking mental health treatment, doctors didn’t trust his account of the experiments he participated in at Holmesburg.
“While Kligman was enjoying steak dinner, my father was turning over tables.” Adrianne Jones-Alston
While the number of living survivors who participated in the Holmesburg experiments has dwindled to just a small handful, the impact of the experiments remains ever-present in the lives of their families and loved ones. Adrianne Jones-Alston’s story perhaps most clearly illustrates how the past is very much present and continues to inform the lives of each subsequent generation. At the forum, Jones-Alston recalled how her life at home dramatically changed when her father, Leodus Jones, returned home. Jones-Alston describes her father as a family man and recounted memories of them enjoying quality time before he was incarcerated, making memories all across Philadelphia. But when he returned home from Holmesburg, he was a different person.
“I didn’t know what to make of it,” Jones-Alston said, “I don’t know why our fun stopped.”
Jones participated in a number of tests at Holmesburg and Jones-Alston and the rest of her family ended up on the receiving end of the consequences long after the clinical trials ended. In addition to the scars and sores that ran down his neck and back, Jones-Alston also noticed that her father lacked the attentiveness he’d once shown. He’d also grown hostile and violent.
“While Kligman was enjoying steak dinner, my father was turning over tables,” Alston-Jones said.
The turbulence of life at home led her to run away as a teenager. Once on the streets, she experienced homelessness, violence, and mental health challenges that ultimately led to her own incarceration and repeated recidivism. Her life came to mirror her father’s troubles in a cycle that can be described as nothing short of generational trauma.
“No one thought about the children or the families of these test subjects,” Jones-Alston said. “We didn’t know what was coming home to us.”
Like a “light going off in a dark room”
When Allen Hornblum first stepped foot inside Holmesburg in 1971, he had recently finished graduate school and intended to run the prison’s educational program. But what he immediately observed inside the facility startled him and would change the trajectory of his life’s work.
“It was that first day walking in the Philly prisons—which consisted of Holmesburg detention center and the House of Correction—that I saw many startling, unexpected things,” Hornblum said in an interview with Prism. “But one of the most outlandish and shocking was scores and scores of inmates dressed in medical tape and adhesive tape —it looked like there had just been a recent riot or a gang war on a cellblock, and I couldn’t get over what had precipitated something like this. The very next day, I asked the guard on a block, ‘What’s the story with all these guys with medical tape?’ He just chuckled and said, ‘Oh, that’s nothing, Mr. Hornblum. That’s just the perfume tests for the University of Pennsylvania.'”
Kligman, a dermatology faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania, was first brought into Holmesburg prison in 1951 at the request of facility administrators who needed help treating an outbreak of athlete’s foot. But rather than a temporary problem, Kligman saw endless opportunity. In a 1966 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Kligman said , “All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.”
Between 1951 and 1974, Kligman led experiments that advanced his own discoveries around skincare, garnered partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, and wreaked havoc on the bodies and minds of incarcerated men at Holmesburg. Study volunteers were given patch tests to monitor their reactions to things like perfume and baby products. Major corporations like Johnson & Johnson contracted with Kligman for tests, including one that required injecting men with asbestos to compare it against the naturally occurring mineral Talc which can contain asbestos . (Johnson & Johnson has long denied as part of lawsuits that its talc-based baby powder contained cancer-causing asbestos. In one case, the company paid $2.5 billion in damages and interest.) Prisoners at Holmesburg were also inoculated with experimental vaccines for viruses and infections, including Candida and herpes simplex, and through tests commissioned by the Dow Chemical Company, were exposed to the poison dioxin, a component of the powerful herbicide Agent Orange.
Decades after he stopped working at Holmesburg, Hornblum remained shocked that the medical experiments he saw were still undocumented and unexposed by historians or the media, so he told the story himself. Hornblum’s 1998 debut novel Acres of Skin revealed to the nation what had gone on in Holmesburg for over 20 years.
“Because I witnessed it and saw it in the flesh—literally—it always impacted me as something that was unethical, immoral, and never should have been broached,” said Hornblum. “What I found out and documented in Acres of Skin is that even though there were other states that allowed this to happen, and many prisons that did experiments, there was nothing like what occurred in the Philadelphia prison system.”
Throughout the 1960s, at least half of state prison systems hosted medical research. By 1972, FDA officials estimated that over 90% of all investigational drugs were first tested on prisoners. However, Kligman’s experiments stood apart due to the length of the tests, their scope, and the lucrative partnerships they attracted–including those with the military and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
“The prison system under different mayoral administrations never should have allowed this to occur,” said Hornblum. “University of Pennsylvania should have never gotten involved with this and should have never allowed their dermatology department and one of their most important dermatologists, to do this. But they all did it—especially Penn—because they were making so much money from it and it benefited them greatly. In fact, it still is. They’re still making money from Retin-A, and Johnson & Johnson is still making money.”
“We deeply regret the conditions under which these studies were conducted, and in no way do they reflect the values or practices we employ today,” a company spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson said in an email to Prism. “Our ethical code is aligned with today’s advanced protocols and the latest ethical guidelines from leading medical institutions. At the time of these studies, nearly 50 years ago, testing of this nature among this cohort set was widely accepted, including by prominent researchers, leading public companies, and the U.S. government itself.”
Prism contacted the University of Pennsylvania for comment and will update the article with their statement when they respond.
While Kligman collected large checks—including $10,000 from Dow Chemical Company for his dioxin experiments—the incarcerated men at Holmesburg at the center of the experiments received in some cases as little as a dollar a day for lending their bodies. The money served as the primary incentive for participating in testing, making medical experimentation in prison highly coercive. Given the dearth of opportunities to earn money in prison and the necessity of funds for commissary items, supporting family back home, or paying bail, presenting these experiments as one of the only ways to earn income erodes all notions of true consent.
In fact, Kligman’s experiments were conducted without full and informed consent. In one example reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer , forms for the dioxin experiment did not mention which chemical was being used or the potential side effects. Further, Kligman failed to keep appropriate records that would allow researchers to track the long-term effects of these substances on participants’ bodies.
Hornblum views the experiments as an “egregious breach” of the Nuremberg Code, a set of ethical research principles drafted in the aftermath of World War II and in direct response to inhumane experiments conducted in Nazi concentration camps by German physicians. While American jurists penned the code, Honblum notes that American physicians “never bothered to buy into it ourselves.” The first principle of the Nuremberg Code, which explains that human subjects must voluntarily offer consent and have the legal capacity to do so, makes clear why Hornblum views medical experimentation inside the prison as inherently unethical.
“When Kligman walked into Holmesburg in 1951, there were certainly rules or attitudes or guidelines giving medical researchers guidelines that they should follow with regard to human experimentation, but the American medical community found them too rigid and detrimental to the goals of doctors, researchers, and pharmaceutical companies,” said Hornblum. “So those guidelines were not stressed, and doctors were comfortable with doing what they wanted and what was consistent with their own research interests.”
These interests, which included product development, fostering partnerships with pharmaceutical companies, or publishing in high-profile medical journals, did not align with considering the welfare of test subjects.
“They had every reason in the world to say, ‘To hell with any guidelines, and I’m going to do what’s going to foster my own pocketbook, my reputation, my career.’ And they did that over and over. What sort of changes the landscape in my view is the Tuskegee syphilis study . When that is illuminated, in 1972 , it is sort of like a light going off in a dark room.”
By 1974, Kligman’s research was suspended indefinitely. Hornblum’s work exposed Kligman’s experiments on a national stage, and the Tuskegee-Syphilis study not only helped usher in new standards but raised questions about the ethics of medical research taking advantage of participants from vulnerable populations.
But even as society shifted its norms and expectations around prison experiments, Kligman never expressed remorse or acknowledged the harms of his work. Years after the Holmesburg tests ended, Kligman famously told his colleagues, “It was years before the authorities knew I was conducting various studies on prisoner volunteers. Things were simpler then. Informed consent was unheard of. No one asked me what I was doing. It was a wonderful time.” In 2006, he reiterated to The New York Times that it was a “big mistake” to shut down the prison experiments. Kligman’s unwavering commitment to his experiments flies in the face of the harms they caused.
“My father’s skin is in those jars”
In 2000, 298 men who’d been incarcerated at Holmesburg filed a lawsuit against the University of Pennsylvania, the City of Philadelphia, Johnson & Johnson, and Dow Chemical Company alleging that they were not properly informed of the risks inherent in participating in the experiments and that the University should acknowledge the long-term harm caused. In 2002, the Federal District Court dismissed the case asserting that the statute of limitations had passed.
While the activism of the early aughts failed to yield any acknowledgment of the Holmesburg survivors, the uprisings of 2020 renewed demands for reparations on behalf of the Holmesburg survivors and a deeper interrogation of Kligman’s legacy.
In 2021, the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine released a statement regarding Kligman, writing that “the work done by Dr. Kligman was terribly disrespectful of individuals—many of whom were imprisoned Black men—denying them the autonomy and informed consent which the medical community now considers to be foundational underpinnings for conducting ethical research. Legality, of itself, does not excuse these activities, which are not now, and never were, morally acceptable, even if Dr. Kligman and his contemporaries believed them to be.”
In addition to formally apologizing, the school announced the termination of a lectureship dedicated to Kligman and renamed one of the professorships named in his honor. The school also announced the creation of a multi-year financial commitment to redirect funds that were formerly held in Kligman’s name towards scholarships, residencies, and post-doctoral research fellowships designed for dermatologists interested in conducting research related to skin disorders among people of color.
In 2022, the City of Philadelphia also issued a formal apology to those subjected to the experiments in Holmesburg, with Mayor Jim Kenney acknowledging that “it took far too long to hear these words.” Finally, this January—20 years after the Holmesburg survivors staged a protest outside of their halls—the College of Physicians of Philadelphia released a public statement offering “its deepest sympathies for those who suffered, including their families” and saying that while the apology is “long overdue, it is no less heartfelt for the delay.” The organization also pledged to work closely with the Philadelphia Inmate Justice Coalition and announced that Kligman’s 2003 award would be rescinded.
“I have both dreams and nightmares. I want something to abate those nightmares.” Irvin moore
While these apologies and acknowledgments have been welcomed by Holmesurg survivors and their families, financial reparations have remained elusive. Audience members at the St. Joseph’s panel were especially keen on understanding what financial redress might look like, but the contours of it and the steps for attaining it continue to be blurry.
Jones-Alston appeared hopeful that reparations would come to pass. She also acknowledged that the process by which reparations would be doled out is something the entities that benefited most from Kligman’s research have the expertise, knowledge, and capacity to figure out if they wanted to. She outlined that financial reparations could include not just direct payments to survivors but also payments for mental health care and other medical treatments and scholarships for their descendants. Jones-Alston maintained a balance between being clear that financial reparations are owed—declaring poignantly that her “father’s skin is in those jars in CVS and Target,” a reference to the near ubiquity of retinol products—while also illuminating the need for something less tangible albeit just as important—healing.
“We need the community to wake up and help us with the healing process,” she told Prism.
But while the two may feel separate, Irvin Moore highlighted the interconnectedness of healing and financial security. While a monetary amount can never truly equal what is owed to survivors, there is a barrier to fully tending to one’s emotional and spiritual well-being when the daily task of staying financially afloat is so challenging.
“I have both dreams and nightmares,” said Moore. “I want something to abate those nightmares.”
Federal regulations and free will
Despite these more recent acknowledgments and apologies, the earliest recognition of Holmesburg’s legacy and other medical experiments that have exploited incarcerated people was the creation of new, tighter regulations governing medical experimentation in prison. A 1976 report by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare recommended that medical experimentation inside prisons be restricted to studies that were low-risk, non-intrusive, and would also be beneficial to the individual participant. Passed in 1978, regulations based on this report outlined the categories under which federally funded research in prison would be permitted. These categories limit prison research to issues unique to the carceral environment, such as studies about the effects of incarceration, prisons as institutions, and conditions that acutely affect incarcerated people. These regulations also require independent review bodies to evaluate all potential research studies.
Despite these comprehensive regulations, their scope is limited to research receiving federal funds, excluding studies conducted by private entities. Further, companies and correction systems—both public and private—have continued to conduct studies with questionable ethics throughout the 2000s, albeit far less often than before 1976.
Still, discourse continues about the potential value of loosening restrictions so incarcerated people can participate in clinical trials. Some researchers believe expanding prison research could benefit incarcerated volunteers without compromising ethical standards. Such benefits could include the provision of healthcare that people inside may need while offering greater insight into ailments that disproportionately—though not uniquely—impact incarcerated people. Advocates of more deregulations also argue that including incarcerated populations in experimental research can remedy grave demographic disparities often found in studies. Recognizing that most clinical trials are overwhelmingly composed of white, male participants while men of color are particularly underrepresented, advocates of looser regulations argue that opening research to those in prison will ensure more people of color—particularly men of color—are adequately represented in research. Importantly, some argue that barring incarcerated people from the right to choose to participate in trials also strips them of their agency.
Willamette University law professor Laura Appleman has written about the importance of maintaining, if not tightening, current restrictions around experimental prison research. Yet, in an interview with Prism, the professor acknowledged the concern that regulations also mean outside forces are dictating what those inside can participate in. The answer “depends on what you think about free will, agency, and cost.”
“Most states are very wary of having prisoners consent to medical trials because you can’t truly consent under correctional control,” said Appleman.
This question around agency and trusting that those inside can and should be able to make decisions around their health and the value of participating in clinical trials—with adequate information—becomes particularly urgent during public health crises. When trials for the COVID-19 vaccine were underway, there were public discussions about whether opening up participation to incarcerated people would be exploitative or ethically sound. In an interview with Science , Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, a sociologist and epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, noted the considerations that must be made with expanding access to clinical trials to those inside prison.
“Incarcerated people do have different risks, in terms of the barriers they face to getting certain elements of routine health care along with their potential to be exploited,” said Dr. Brinkley-Rubinstein. “But they also potentially would gain more from vaccination, given these settings are extreme amplifiers of infection.”
While arguments about the viability of including incarcerated people in vaccine clinical trials raised questions about its potential impact on keeping people inside safe, the rollout of the approved vaccines suggests that the health and well-being of people inside continue to be deprioritized when not outright ignored. Appleman noted that in states like Oregon, incarcerated people were among the last to receive the vaccine.
Laws without Morals
Despite the potential benefits to individual health and personal sense of agency, the precarity of the prison environment poses staggering questions. It implements important ethical limitations even as our society is more vigilant about potential exploitation than it was just 50 years ago. The perceived benefits of allowing medical experimentation inside must also be considered alongside the profit incentives that the prison system itself stands to gain when contracting with companies or universities eager to do their research with incarcerated populations.
Outside of the seemingly altruistic desire to improve prisoner health, there are unique features of prison life borne out of poor conditions that can also prove attractive to researchers. As recently as 2018, there was a raging debate in the medical community regarding a research proposal to use prisoners for a large-scale, five-year study measuring the impact of daily sodium intake and the potential benefits and risks of a low-sodium diet. The proposal called for 10,000 to 20,000 incarcerated people to participate, with half being administered a low-sodium diet and the other half maintaining their current diet. Volunteers would not be given the option to choose the group they were in.
While advocates of the study argued that the findings could improve the health of participating volunteers as well as the broader community, ethical questions abound. The features of prison life—namely, the inability of incarcerated people to shape their own diets and receive healthy food—created an attractive environment for these particular researchers. Thus, correctional facilities may not be incentivized to change unhealthy conditions if they continue to garner partnerships with research entities.
In an essay from the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review, this point is underscored that “the dependency of prisoners on the outcome of a salt study is not an argument for their participation in studies that contribute to societal knowledge and may influence prison leaders. It is an indictment of the oppressive state in which prisoners live.”
“Were we not human beings?” irvin moore
Applemanhas asserted that “there is no way to properly oversee medical experiments or make up for the coercive nature of incarceration.” A potential solution, she says, could come in using synthetic cadavers, skin, and bones instead of humans in experimental research, but such biotechnology is expensive and may fail to fully replicate the human body.
The question for the medical field is not simply whether it will learn from the past but what specific lessons it will glean. Should it continue to seek new ways to benefit from incarcerated populations, without fully acknowledging that such benefits are made possible by the harmful nature of incarceration itself? As long as researchers seek to make new advancements, medical experimentation will be required and the use of captive populations may continue to be incentivized. As such, debates about the use of captive populations will abound even as societal standards on what is appropriate and ethical shift.
But perhaps the true measure of how far our ethical standards have pivoted will be whether those who have borne the greatest cost of past experimentation will be compensated and their losses fully recognized. Survivors are not just living with ongoing pain, but also the gnawing unknowing of which experiments might have caused what ailments and the total incomprehension of what their bodies were subjected to.
Early on during Moore’s testimony, he made clear that much of what he has learned in life was gleaned inside prison, including the meaning of ethics. But those moral codes never aligned with the actions of entities like the University of Pennsylvania, whose motto—Leges sine Moribus vanae, he pointed out—translates to “laws without morals are useless.”
“Were we not human beings?” asked Moore. “Did that not apply to us?”
Tamar Sarai
Tamar Sarai is a features staff reporter at Prism. Follow her on Twitter @bytamarsarai. More by Tamar Sarai
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