Feature: Human experiments -- chilling crimes behind walls of U.S. prison

PHILADELPHIA, United States, Feb. 6 (Xinhua) -- When Allen Hornblum began to work as a literacy instructor in Philadelphia's prison system in 1971, he immediately noticed something unusual and chilling behind the walls.

Many inmates at Holmesburg Prison, most of them being African American men, had patches or gauze pads on their backs. Later, Hornblum found out those were the results of longtime and extensive human experimentations.

"It really is a very dark mark on Philadelphia's history," Hornblum told Xinhua during a recent interview outside Holmesburg while describing the prison, given the nickname The Terrordome, as "arguably the largest human experimentation center in the United States."

The human trials were led by a dermatologist named Albert Kligman associated with the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). Hornblum, author of two books on the horrifying subject -- Acres of Skin and Sentenced to Science -- said that though the prisoners signed up to get paid for partaking in Kligman's research programs, they didn't really understand to what risk they would be exposed.

"The inmates were not particularly sophisticated. The vast majority of them were unschooled," Hornblum said based on interviews with dozens of prisoners and years of in-depth research after giving up his job in the Philadelphia Sheriff's Office in 1993. "Even though they were the subjects, they were not told what they were being injected with or having rubbed on them."

Government records show that from 1951 to 1974, hundreds of Holmesburg inmates were intentionally exposed to pharmaceuticals, viruses, fungus, asbestos, and even dioxin. Many of the "test subjects" were awaiting prosecution, and attempting to save enough money to make bail. The experiments had different sponsors, including major pharmaceutical companies and the U.S. military.

"There were very few jobs in the jail. If you were lucky enough to get one, pushing a broom on a block, you may make 50 cents a day, 25 cents a day," Hornblum recalled. "But if you were a test subject for Albert Kligman -- the lead doctor here -- you could make at least a dollar a day, in some cases, 1.5 to 2 dollars a day."

In return for the slim payment, the inmates had to suffer from symptoms such as skin itching, rashes, discolorations, and fevers, and in some cases, they became more violent. Nevertheless, they "were left somewhat incompetent until they recovered from whatever drugs they had been given," said the author.

"They were basically forgotten, the way doctors use lab rats or dogs or monkeys or chimpanzees. They may inject them with something. They may rub something on them. They monitor them for a while. When the experiment is over, they basically discard them," he said. "Whatever took place here with radioactive isotopes or dioxin or the chemical warfare agents, there was no follow-up."

After Acres of Skin was published in 1998, Holmesburg's inmates learned what had gone on for the first time and started to gather together. Subsequently, Hornblum met Edward Anthony, a test subject "in a series of very, very nasty, unethical experiments that basically destroyed his life, or at least that portion of his life."

When Anthony got back on the street, he was "still suffering in many ways," according to Hornblum, who later penned Sentenced to Science, "basically one Black man's account of what happened to him as a human guinea pig."

Like other victims, Anthony developed "a great distrust of doctors and medical institutions," Hornblum revealed. "They don't trust the medical community anymore because they saw how themselves and others were mistreated and used and abused."

The Holmesburg victims filed suit but didn't get very far because of a statute of limitations in the state of Pennsylvania. Plus, Hornblum said these men "were deceived" and "were made to file and sign their signature on waiver forms."

In October 2022, the city of Philadelphia issued a formal apology for experiments conducted on African American inmates at Holmesburg, saying that "this is yet another tragic example of disgraceful and unethical practices of medical experimentation on people of color throughout our country's history."

Penn's School of Medicine -- where Kligman was a long-standing faculty member in the Department of Dermatology before his death in 2010 -- apologized in 2021 "for the pain Dr. Kligman's work caused to incarcerated individuals, their families, and our broader community."

"Penn Medicine acknowledges 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," it said in a statement.

Hornblum said he believes the apologies "should have happened years, if not decades earlier" and that there "really is an egregious sin of commission and omission there" because "it's all happening after Americans Juris write the Nuremberg Code," a set of ethical research principles delimiting permissible medical experimentation on human subjects.

"The medical community disregarded it. They didn't feel it was helpful. They didn't feel it was consistent with exploring the great scientific quests and quandaries. They thought it was an obstacle. So they didn't abide by it," he said. "That's basically the sad commentary of this that some very smart people shoved ethics away because they saw it as an imposition, as a problem, as something that's gonna block them from their scientific quests. And that's why there are so many instances in prison and other institutions where people were used as guinea pigs for medical experimentation.

Kligman, however, didn't appear to be remorseful for what he had done.

Hornblum, who once interviewed Kligman prior to the publication of Acres of Skin, said: "I don't believe his attitude ever changed. He saw this as a way to do experiments ... He walked through the big front doors of that prison and all he saw throughout the prison were not inmates, not people, but as he said, acres of skin."

Hornblum said, "the American people, and particularly the medical community and the academic community, should recognize the egregious nature of what took place."

"Some of their top doctors, scientists were part of a really outrageously destructive program to people. They basically used individuals -- African Americans, senior citizens, children with all sorts of learning disabilities," he said. "They used them as raw material for experimentation and then discarded them."