50 years after Philadelphia ended prison medical testing, families are demanding reparations

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PHILADELPHIA – Fifty years ago, prison officials in Philadelphia ended a medical testing program that had an Ivy League researcher conducting human tests on incarcerated people, many of them black, for decades. Now the program’s survivors and their descendants want reparations.

Thousands of people in Holmesburg Prison were subjected to painful skin tests, anesthesia-free surgeries, harmful radiation and mind-altering drugs for research on everything from hair dye, laundry detergents and other household items to chemical warfare agents and dioxins. In return, they could receive $1 a day in spending money, which they used to purchase provisions items or try to post bail.

“We were fertile ground for those people,” says Herbert Rice, a retired city worker from Philadelphia who says he has had lifelong psychiatric problems after using an unknown drug that caused him to hallucinate in Holmesburg in the late 1960s. “It was like dangling a carrot in front of a rabbit.”

The city and the University of Pennsylvania have issued formal apologies in recent years. Lawsuits have been largely unsuccessful, except for a few minor settlements. On Wednesday, families at a Penn law school will seek damages from the school and pharmaceutical companies they say profited from Cold War research.

A spokesperson for the University of Pennsylvania said the school had no comment on the pursuit of reparations.

The tests were led by Albert M. Kligman, a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist with research ties to the military, CIA and pharmaceutical industries, according to author Allen Hornblum, who led an adult literacy program in Holmesburg in the 1970s and reported the effects saw. firsthand.

Medical testing in prisons was ubiquitous in the 1960s, with radiation studies conducted on people incarcerated in Washington and Oregon, cancer studies in Ohio and burn studies in Virginia, Hornblum said.

For much of the 20th century, human testing was also conducted on institutionalized children, hospital patients, and other vulnerable populations. The tide turned in the early 1970s, when outrage over the Tuskegee Syphilis Study — in which the U.S. government left black men untreated for syphilis to study the disease’s impact — sparked an evolution in medical ethics, Hornblum said. Kligman defended his work until his death in 2010.

He is considered the first dermatologist to demonstrate a link between sun exposure and wrinkles. He patented Retin-A, a vitamin A derivative commonly known as tretinoin, as an acne treatment in 1967 and received a new patent in 1986 after discovering the drug’s wrinkle-fighting abilities.

“Retin-A was discovered and created at the Holmesburg prison,” Rice said. “They made millions and millions of dollars off the skin on our backs.”

In a 1966 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, Kligman described his first visit to Holmesburg with excitement, saying, “All I saw before me were acres of skin.”

Hornblum said there may be some parallels in the case of Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman whose descendants last year settled a lawsuit against a biomedical company that reproduced her cervical cells without her consent in 1951. The resulting HeLa cells have become a cornerstone of modern medicine.

Rice, after serving about three years for burglary, later earned his GED and built a 30-year career with the city recreation department, where he rose to a supervisory position. But he also spent three stints in psychiatric hospitals, saw his marriage fall apart and lost contact with his children for a time. As he approaches his 80th birthday, he is still on lithium and cannot sleep without medication.

He said he would accept reparations, but that they would not change much for him.

“No amount of money can replace what was done to me, what was done to my children and my wife. This was a generational issue,” Rice said, later adding, “There is nothing that can be done to make it right. I’m going to stay like this for the rest of my life.”