Nearly 300 ex-inmates of a county jail in Philadelphia have sued the University of Pennsylvania, charging that they were injured and mistreated during studies of skin treatments and other drugs by the university during the 1960’s and 1970’s. The inmates charge that researchers deliberately exposed them to dangerous substances but told them the experiments were harmless.
The suit, filed on Tuesday in Philadelphia, alleges that the university coerced the prisoners into participating, and failed to tell them that Penn stood to benefit financially from commercial products developed from the research.
Besides the university, the lawsuit names Albert M. Kligman, a Penn dermatologist who conducted much of the research and is credited with developing the anti-wrinkle treatment Retin A; and Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical company, which sells skin products that use Retin A. The company has paid the university millions of dollars in fees for use of the discovery.
The lawsuit also names as defendants the City of Philadelphia, which charged researchers a fee for access to the prisoners, “in effect renting out the individuals who participated in the testing,” the lawsuit says. And it names the Dow Chemical Company, which sponsored research done on the prisoners that involved the toxic chemical dioxin, which was an ingredient in its herbicide products, including the defoliant Agent Orange.
The story of the experiments and the inmates was described in a 1998 book, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison (Routledge), by Allen Hornblum, an adjunct professor at Temple University. Mr. Hornblum recounted how researchers had performed a variety of experiments involving skin treatments that seemed inhumane and that ex-inmates said had left them with scars and bad memories. (See an article from The Chronicle, July 24, 1998.)
The plaintiffs also charge that the researchers exposed them to radioactive isotopes and psychotropic drugs, including LSD, according to Thomas M. Nocella, a Philadelphia lawyer who filed the action.
Many of the plaintiffs are now in their 50’s or 60’s and are “quite ill” from a variety of illnesses, said Mr. Nocella, who hopes to prove that the experiments played a role. The ex-inmates are suing jointly as individuals.
“They were testing people until they hurt them, and after they hurt them, they often didn’t treat them,” Mr. Nocella said. “You couldn’t find someone from outside a prison who would have agreed to be tested that way.”
The experiments took place at Holmesburg Prison between 1960 and 1974, the year the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania enacted a law banning medical experiments involving prisoners. The inmates at Holmesburg were awaiting trial or serving non-felony sentences. The prison closed in 1995.
Researchers typically paid the prisoners $1 or $2 a day to participate, and up to $50 a day for studies involving radioactive isotopes. Mr. Nocella argues that because of their captive status and those financial inducements, the prisoners did not freely give informed consent to join the studies.
Those payments were much less than what other researchers were paying volunteers in studies outside of prison, the lawsuit adds. It seeks an unspecified amount of compensation for the plaintiffs’ pain and suffering.
Rebecca Harmon, a spokeswoman for the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, said the university had not yet seen the lawsuit. “However, as we have stated previously, during the 1950’s and 1960’s, the use of willing, compensated prisoners for biomedical research was a commonly accepted practice by this nation’s scientists.”
In a 1998 interview with The Chronicle, Richard L. Tennan, senior vice dean of the medical school, said he agreed that the experiments were inhumane, but noted that standards were different at the time, and that many discoveries on skin diseases were made as a result of the tests.
A spokesman for Johnson & Johnson told the Associated Press that it had tested cosmetic and skin-care products on inmates at Holmesburg Prison. But the company said none of the ingredients cited in the part of the lawsuit it had seen were used in the company’s products.
Medical research involving prisoners has been controversial since revelations of Nazi abuses during World War II. Current federal regulations allow research on prisoners under special circumstances. Requirements include a heightened level of review by university oversight committees.
Over the past year, federal officials have cited four universities -- but not Penn -- for deficiencies in oversight procedures for research involving prisoners. (See an article from The Chronicle, September 15.)
Meanwhile, Penn’s research on nonprisoner human volunteers has been under scrutiny since the death of an 18-year-old man in a gene-therapy experiment in September 1999.
