Several unethical medical experiments, including applying pesticides and herbicides to the men’s skin and injecting them with them, were carried out on at least 2,600 jailed men in the 1960s and 1970s at a prestigious medical school in California.
The studies were carried out on males at the California Medical Facility, a prison hospital in Vacaville, about 50 miles (80.47 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco, by two dermatologists from the University of California, San Francisco, one of whom is still employed by the university. In 1977, the practice came to an end.
In a report about the experiments released earlier this month by the university’s Program for Historical Reconciliation, it was claimed that the doctors used “questionable informed consent practices” and subjected men to procedures who did not have any of the illnesses or conditions that the research was intended to treat. The results of the program were originally covered by The San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday.
Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Dan Lowenstein issued a statement saying, “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.”
According to the report, additional investigation is required to ascertain the severity of the injuries brought on by the tests on the convicts and what the institution ought to do in response.
The institution released a statement on Thursday saying, “We are still in the process of analyzing the suggestions and identifying appropriate next steps.” We shall do this with humility and a persistent dedication to a more ethical, just, and egalitarian future.
Officials at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have not yet read the report, according to Dana Simas, a representative for the agency. However, according to Simas, the organization and California Correctional Health Care Services “strive to ensure that the jailed population receives proper health care that meets the community standard of care and ethics.”
The study’s emphasis was on work by William Epstein and Howard Maibach. At the institution, Maibach is still employed, and Epstein passed away in 2006. It was unclear right away whether Maibach would be disciplined as a result of the report.
According to a 1977 article in the university’s student newspaper, The Synapse, the experiments involved giving doses of pesticides and herbicides to the prisoners who volunteered for the studies and were paid $30 per month for their participation. According to the article, this was one of the highest-paid jobs at the prison and was in high demand.
To test the participants’ “host attraction of humans to mosquitos,” other trials involved placing tiny cages containing mosquitoes next to their arms or directly on their skin.
A year after the federal government banned the practice, California outlawed human subject research in state jails in 1977, putting an end to the study.
According to the report, Epstein supported biomedical testing in jails when he testified in state hearings in 1977, and investigators were unable to discover any evidence to suggest that he had since changed his mind.
In a letter to the university’s dermatology department, Maibach expressed regret for his involvement in outdated research but asserted that he thought some of the patients had benefited from the trials.
He wrote, “What I thought was ethical, forty or fifty years ago, is not regarded as ethical today.” I cannot think of any instance, in which the volunteers in the research suffered a medical injury.
Although they were trained by a now-deceased Philadelphia doctor whose research at a Pennsylvania prison was unethical and disrespectful toward the subjects, many of whom were incarcerated Black men, the university claims there is no evidence that the doctors’ research was specifically directed at Black men.
The report said: “While one of his (Maibach’s) recent articles suggests a potential reconsideration of the biology of race, we believe the long history of his research on racial skin differences, with race as a possible biological factor, perpetuated the continuation of racial science in dermatology and has yet to be publicly addressed.
Edward Maibach, Maibach’s son, informed reporters in an email on Thursday that his father had suffered a stroke the week before and was unable to reply to media requests.
The younger Maibach claimed that his father had been denied access to the report’s authors’ documents and a meeting with them. He said that his father was mistreated in the investigation and a university news release “as a “lone ranger” who appeared to act at UCSF without consulting or getting permission from others. This is also untrue.”
Edward Maibach wrote that UCSF executives, including the UCSF ethicist, were aware of and approved of Dr. Maibach’s activities in Vacaville.
