A California medical school has issued an apology for research conducted in the 1960s and 1970s by faculty members who conducted dozens of medical experiments on thousands of prison inmates, but one of the professors involved still works at the school.
The men were “assessed or treated for psychiatric diagnoses” and the school injected their veins and skin with various pesticides and herbicides during the study.
The public is calling for the one living professor to be fired from the institution despite the professor recently suffering a stroke.
For two decades, starting during the heights of the civil rights movement and ending in 1977, two professors from the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Howard Maibach and Dr. William Epstein, conducted unethical experiments (in the name of science) on at least 2,600 incarcerated men at the California Medical Facility, a prison hospital in Vacaville. Now, the school is apologizing, claiming it did not know the extent of the research until this year.
“UCSF apologizes for its explicit role in the harm caused to the subjects, their families, and our community by facilitating this research, and acknowledges the institution’s implicit role in perpetuating unethical treatment of vulnerable and underserved populations — regardless of the legal or perceptual standards of the time,” Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Dan Lowenstein said in a statement.
The duo were faculty members in UCSF’s Department of Dermatology and trained with another eugenicist, Dr. Albert Kligman, whose unethical experiments on inmates in the 1950s to 1970s at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia made recent headlines.
The association, according to the school, the UCSF Program for Historical Reconciliation (PHR), prompted an investigation into their work.
Because Epstein, a former chair of the department, died in 2006, the committee focused its investigation on the work of Maibach, who currently is an active member of the department despite being ill.
According to the report, “Maibach was involved in human subjects research of incarcerated individuals until it was halted by the state of California in 1977. He began conducting human subjects research on incarcerated individuals during his fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Albert Kligman. When Maibach joined UCSF in 1961, he took Kligman’s model and adapted it for his use at the California Medical Facility (CMF).”
