1951, Holmesburg Prison. Philadelphia. Dr. Albert Kligman was 35 years old and a scuzhole and sleazebag. A dermatology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The prison had asked him to come help with an athlete's foot outbreak. He showed up. Looked around. Saw 3,000 inmates. Almost 9 out of 10 of them were Black. Most of the rest were Puerto Rican. He said later: "All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time." He decided to use them as test subjects. For the next 23 years, he ran experiments on the prisoners. Tested skin creams. Shampoos. Perfumes. Deodorants. Mostly normal stuff at first. Then bigger companies started paying him. Johnson & Johnson. Dow Chemical. The US Army. The CIA. The experiments got worse. He injected men with herpes. With wart virus. With staph infection. He poured chemicals on their backs to see what would burn the skin. He yanked out their fingernails to test how nails grew back. He put boots full of fungus on their feet for a week to study foot infections. He gave them experimental drugs without telling them what was in the drugs. He put radioactive material on their skin to study how it absorbed. He gave them LSD and other mind-altering drugs as part of the CIA's MK Ultra program. He injected them with asbestos. To compare it with talc powder. Johnson & Johnson paid for that one. They wanted to know if their baby powder might cause cancer. The men didn't know what was being done to them. The forms they signed didn't list the chemicals. Most of the prisoners couldn't read anyway. Many were illiterate. The prison paid them a dollar a day. Sometimes a dollar fifty. That was good money in prison. Most prisoners only earned a quarter a day pushing a broom. So they signed up. Many were waiting for trial. Couldn't afford bail. Saw the experiments as their only way to earn money. They got patches stuck on their backs. Pills given to them. Shots in their arms. Things they couldn't pronounce dripped onto their skin. A former prison worker said you could walk through Holmesburg and see hundreds of inmates with patches on their backs and arms. Some were healing. Some were oozing. Some had open wounds that had been there for months. The men called themselves "guinea pigs." Most went along with it. They had no choice. The money helped their families. They had no idea what was being put into their bodies. The worst experiments were yet to come. In 1965, Dow Chemical Company paid Kligman $10,000 to test dioxin. Dioxin is the poisonous part of Agent Orange. The chemical the US Army was spraying on Vietnam. It causes cancer. Skin disease. Liver damage. Birth defects in children. Dow wanted to know how dangerous it was for skin contact. Kligman painted dioxin onto the backs of 70 prisoners. The dose he used was 468 times stronger than what Dow had originally asked for. The men got severe acne all over their skin. Open sores. Pus. Some lasted for months. Some lasted for years. Many of them developed cancer years later. The forms the men signed never said the word "dioxin." They were told it was just a "skin test." Around the same time, the US Army paid Kligman to test mind-control drugs. Trying to find chemicals that could be used in war. Or against enemies. Kligman gave the prisoners hallucinogens. Drugs that made them see things that weren't there. Hear voices. Lose their grip on reality. Some of the men never recovered. The Army also wanted Kligman to test "skin hardeners" that might protect soldiers from chemical weapons. Kligman painted experimental chemicals onto the prisoners. Many got severe burns. Inflammation that lasted weeks. Some men begged him to stop. Kligman wrote in his notes that the men "complained bitterly." He kept going. While all of this was happening, Kligman was also doing skin care research that would make him famous. He invented Retin-A. The acne medicine. Then the anti-aging cream that made him rich. He developed it from experiments on prisoners. He patented it in 1969. Made millions of dollars from it. It's still sold today. One of the most successful skin care products in history. Here's how he got away with it. In the 1950s and 1960s, prison experiments were normal in America. Drug companies needed humans to test new products. Prisoners were convenient. They couldn't say no easily. They needed money. The University of Pennsylvania backed Kligman. Made money from his research. Looked the other way. The city of Philadelphia knew what was happening. Allowed it. Government agencies funded his work. The Army. The CIA. The Atomic Energy Commission. Major companies paid him. Johnson & Johnson. Dow Chemical. Pharmaceutical companies. There were no rules about getting informed consent. The forms were a joke. Nobody checked. It only stopped because of a scandal. In 1973, US Senator Edward Kennedy held hearings about prison experiments. Said they were unethical. Said prisoners couldn't really consent because they were trapped. In 1974, the federal government banned medical experiments on prisoners. Kligman had to shut down his program at Holmesburg. By then, he had experimented on hundreds of men. Some sources say more than 1,500. Holmesburg Prison itself closed in 1995. Bad conditions. Riots. Deaths in custody. Here's what happened after. Most of the prisoners suffered for the rest of their lives. Some had cancer. Some had skin diseases that never healed. Some had mental health problems from the drugs. Some had organ damage they didn't know about. Many died young. In 2000, 298 of the surviving men sued the city, the university, and Kligman. They wanted free medical care. They wanted answers about what had been put in their bodies. The court threw out the lawsuit. The judge said too much time had passed. The statute of limitations had run out. The men got nothing. Some men got small private settlements later. Most got nothing. Albert Kligman never apologized. Never expressed regret. Never admitted he had done anything wrong. In 2006, four years before he died, he told the New York Times: "My view is that shutting the prison experiments down was a big mistake. I still don't see there having been anything wrong with what we were doing." He died in 2010. Age 93. Wealthy. Honored. Famous. The University of Pennsylvania kept his name on awards. Lecture series. Research funds. For decades, dermatologists called him the "father of modern dermatology." Forgot the prisoners. In 2021, after the George Floyd protests, the University of Pennsylvania finally apologized. Removed Kligman's name from awards. In 2022, the city of Philadelphia apologized. In 2023, the Philadelphia College of Physicians apologized. All of them said sorry. None of them paid the survivors. The men who lived through it are mostly dead now. The few who are still alive are old. Many are sick. Most never told their families what had been done to them. Some only learned recently what they had been exposed to. After authors and journalists started digging through old records. A man named Leodus Jones spent decades trying to get justice for the survivors. He died in 2018. His daughter Adrianne continues his work. A man named Edward Anthony was on the dioxin tests. Spent his life with skin diseases. Died still waiting for an apology that arrived too late. Here's what makes this story so painful. The men were not criminals being punished. Many were just waiting for trial. Hadn't been found guilty of anything. They were trapped. They were poor. They were Black or Puerto Rican. A wealthy white doctor saw them as raw material. "Acres of skin." He used them. Made millions of dollars. Got famous. Died rich. They died poor. Sick. Forgotten. Most of them never knew their bodies had been used to develop products that made other people billions. Retin-A is sold in millions of pharmacies today. Anti-aging creams that come from it are advertised in magazines. Almost nobody knows where the science came from. It came from a prison full of Black men in Philadelphia. From dioxin painted on their backs. From asbestos shot into their skin. From drugs forced into their bodies without their knowledge. From a doctor who looked at them and saw a field to harvest. The Holmesburg prisoners. Used as guinea pigs for 23 years. By a doctor who never apologized. Who died honored. By a system that protected him. By a country that turned away. #Holmesburg #MedicalRacism #AcresOfSkin #ForgottenStories ~Forgotten Stories