A prominent California medical school has apologized for conducting dozens of unethical medical experiments on at least 2,600 incarcerated men in the 1960s and 1970s, including putting pesticides and herbicides on the men’s skin and injecting it into their veins.
Two dermatologists at the University of California, San Francisco — one of whom remains at the university — conducted the experiments on men at the California Medical Facility, a prison hospital in Vacaville that’s about 50 miles northeast of San Francisco. The practice was halted in 1977.
The report said further analysis is needed to determine the extent of harms caused to the prisoners as a result of the experiments and what the university should do in response. The report focused on research by Dr. Howard Maibach and Dr. William Epstein. Maibach continues to work at the university, and Epstein died in 2006. It was not immediately clear whether Maibach would face any discipline in light of the report.
The research ended in 1977 when California prohibited human subject research in state prisons, a year after the federal government halted the practice. "What I believed to be ethical as a matter of course forty or fifty years ago is not considered ethical today," he wrote. "I do not recall in any way in which the studies caused medical harm to the participants."
"While one of his recent articles hints at a possible reconsideration of the biology of race, we believe the long history of his research of skin differences along racial lines, with race as a possible biological factor, perpetuated the continuance of racial science in dermatology and has yet to be publicly addressed," the report stated.
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