Philadelphia apologizes for history of prison experiments on Black men, hopes to rectify medical mistrust within community

By Jalen Brown and Hannah Sarisohn, CNN

Philadelphia has apologized for experiments conducted on mostly Black men incarcerated in the city’s now-inactive Holmesburg Prison, which exposed subjects to herpes, skin blistering chemicals, radioactive isotopes, and poisonous chemicals used during the Vietnam war.

In the city’s statement Thursday, Mayor Jim Kenney said the “historical impact and trauma of this practice of medical racism has extended for generations — all the way through the present day.”

“Without excuse, we formally and officially extend a sincere apology to those who were subjected to this inhumane and horrific abuse,” he said in the statement.

The apology is the latest in officials’ reckoning with the past. The Penn Museum announced in August that they’d bury the skulls of 13 enslaved Black Philadelphians whose remains were kept there as part of a “collection,” and the city health commissioner resigned last year after saying he cremated and disposed of remains from the 1985 bombing against members of the Black liberation group MOVE.

The United States has a long history of medical malpractice and unethical experiments against Black citizens, which has led to widespread medical mistrust within the community.

In Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Dr. Albert M. Kiligman, known for patenting acne-medication Retin-A, conducted these experiments from 1951 to 1974. Johnson & Johnson, Dow Chemicals, and the U.S. Army were just some of the many sponsors of these underground human experiments.

Kiligman forcibly removed the subjects’ thumbnails and infected them with ringworm, according to previous CNN reporting, among other chilling trials that left the subjects wounded and disoriented. Most of these incarcerated individuals were not sentenced and awaiting trial; the prison used their desperation for bail money to get them to agree to these abusive experiments, usually paying the subjects $1 a day.

“Recognizing the deep distrust experiments like this have created in our communities of color, we vow to continue to fight the inequities and disparities that continue to this day,” Kenney said in his statement.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is the most notorious example in the US, and California prisons had been forcibly sterilizing Black women since the early 1900s. Much of California’s eugenics program was outlawed in 1979, but laws ending the sterilization of prisoners were not passed until 2014.

This week coincidentally marked the anniversary of Henrietta Lacks’ death — a Black woman whose immortal cells were stolen by John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and remain the backbone of modern medicine to this day. Many biotech and pharmaceutical companies made billions of dollars in profits from these cells, but none of these corporations gave any money to the Lacks family.

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