SAN FRANCISCO – 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 applying pesticides and herbicides to the men’s skin and injecting them into their veins .
Two dermatologists from the University of California, San Francisco — one of whom remains with the university — conducted the experiments on men at the California Medical Facility, a prison hospital in Vacaville, about 50 miles northeast of San Francisco. The practice ceased in 1977.
The University’s Historical Reconciliation Program released a report on the experiments earlier this monthin which he wrote that the doctors engaged in “questionable informed consent practices” and performed procedures on men who did not have any of the diseases or conditions the research was intended to address. The Chronicle of San Francisco reported on the results of the program for the first time on Wednesday.
“UCSF apologizes for its explicit role in the harm done to subjects, their families and our community by facilitating this research, and recognizes the institution’s implicit role in perpetuating the unethical treatment of vulnerable and underserved populations — independently.” by the legal or perceptual standards of the time,” Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Dan Lowenstein said in a statement.
According to the report, further analysis is needed to determine the extent of the harm done to prisoners by the experiments and what the university should do in response.
“We are still in the process of reviewing the recommendations and determining appropriate next steps,” the university said in a statement on Thursday. “We do so with humility and an ongoing commitment to a fairer, more equitable and more ethical future.”
A spokeswoman for the California Department of Justice, Dana Simas, said officials had not yet read the report. However, the agency and California Correctional Health Care Services “make every effort to ensure that the incarcerated population receives appropriate health care that meets community standards of care and ethics,” Simas wrote.
The report focused on the research of Dr. Howard Maibach and Dr. William Epstein. Maibach continues to work at the university, and Epstein died in 2006. It was not immediately clear if Maibach would face disciplinary action in light of the report.
The experiments involved administering doses of pesticides and herbicides to the incarcerated men, who volunteered for the studies and were paid $30 a month for their participation — according to a 1977 article in the university’s student newspaper, The Synapse.
Other experiments included placing small cages of mosquitoes near participants’ arms or directly on their skin to determine “human economic attractiveness to mosquitoes,” the report said.
Research ended in 1977 when California banned research on humans in state prisons, a year after the federal government stopped the practice.
But Epstein testified in state hearings in support of biomedical experimentation in prisons in 1977, the report says, and investigators could find no evidence he changed his mind before he died.
While Maibach wrote that he regrets having participated in research that does not meet current standards in a letter to the dermatological clinic of the universityhe said he believed the experiments had benefited some of the patients.
“What I thought was ethical forty or fifty years ago is no longer ethical today,” he wrote. “I have no recollection of the trials causing any medical harm to the participants.”
The university says there is no evidence that the doctors are doing research aimed specifically at black men, although they were trained by a now-deceased Philadelphia doctor whose research in a Pennsylvania prison was unethical and disrespectful to the subjects, many of whom were incarcerated black men.
The report also noted that many of Maibach’s publications throughout his career continued the biologization of race – which he addressed in his letter, saying he had now “come to understand that race was always a social and not a biological construct , something not appreciated by so many of us in an earlier era.”
“While one of his (Maibach’s) recent articles suggests a possible reappraisal of racial biology, we believe that the long history of his exploration of skin differences along racial lines, with race as a possible biological factor, has perpetuated the continuation of racial science in dermatology and must yet to be addressed publicly,” the report said.
Maibach’s son, Edward Maibach, wrote in an email to The Associated Press on Thursday that his father suffered a stroke last week and is unable to respond to press inquiries.
The younger Maibach said his father was not allowed to meet with the report’s authors or access their documents. The report and a university press release, he wrote, treated his father “as a ‘lone ranger,’ acting seemingly without the knowledge or consent of others at UCSF. That too is wrong.”
“DR. Maibach’s activities in Vacaville were known and supported by UCSF administrators, including the UCSF ethicist,” wrote Edward Maibach.
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