Disturbing History - The Horror of Holmesburg Prison

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

For more than two decades, incarcerated men inside Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison were used as human test subjects in experiments that sound like something out of a dystopian novel. Beginning in 1951, University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Dr. Albert Kligman turned the prison into one of the largest non-therapeutic human research operations in American history, exposing inmates to infectious diseases, radioactive isotopes, mind-altering drugs for the CIA and U.S. Army, dioxin at 468 times the authorized dosage for Dow Chemical, and injections of asbestos funded by Johnson and Johnson.The overwhelming majority of the men subjected to these experiments were Black, and most were paid as little as a dollar a day for their participation. Kligman famously described his first visit to the prison by saying all he saw before him were acres of skin, comparing the inmates to a fertile field. His work at Holmesburg led directly to the development and patent of Retin-A, one of the most widely used skincare medications in the world, generating enormous wealth for Kligman, the University of Pennsylvania, and Johnson and Johnson while the men whose bodies made it possible received nothing.The experiments ended in 1974 after public outcry following the exposure of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, but it would take until 1998 for the full story to reach the public through Allen Hornblum's landmark book Acres of Skin. A lawsuit filed by nearly 300 former test subjects was dismissed on statute of limitations grounds, and Kligman died in 2010 at the age of 93 without ever apologizing. The City of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania, and the College of Physicians have since issued formal apologies, but no reparations have been paid.This episode tells the full story from beginning to end, including the prison's brutal history, the scope and nature of the experiments, the institutions that funded and enabled them, and the survivors who are still fighting to be heard.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth.

If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. There's a building still standing in northeast Philadelphia. It sits at 8215 Torresdale Avenue in a quiet neighborhood called Holmesburg. If you drove past it, you might not give it a second look. Just another old stone structure,

crumbling a little at the edges, surrounded by weeds and chain link fencing. It looks abandoned, forgotten. And that's exactly what a lot of people would prefer. But behind the those walls, for more than two decades, something happened that most Americans have never heard of. Something that, when you hear the details, you'll have a hard time believing took place in the United States. Not in some foreign country. Not during wartime. Not in some rogue black sight hidden from the public. This happened in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in broad daylight, with full knowledge of some of the most respected institutions in the country. Between 1951 and 1974, incarcerated men inside Holmesburg prison were used as human test subjects.

They were exposed to infectious diseases. They were injected with asbestos. They had radioactive isotopes applied to their skin. They swallowed mind-altering drugs for the Central Intelligence Agency. They were dosed with dioxin, the toxic chemical in Agent Orange, at levels hundreds of times higher than what had been authorized. Their fingernails were ripped out. Their skin was burned.

blistered and irradiated. And when it was over, most of them were sent back to their cells with a few dollars in their pocket and no explanation of what had just been done to them. The man behind it all was a University of Pennsylvania dermatologist named Albert Kligman. And here's the part that might bother you the most. Cligman wasn't some fringe figure working in the shadows. He was celebrated. He was awarded. He was wealthy. He patented one of the most popular skin care products in history, a drug called retinae. And the testing that led to that patent,

it was done on the skin of prisoners, mostly black men, men who had no real understanding of what was being applied to their bodies, what was being injected beneath their skin, or what the long-term consequences would be. This isn't a conspiracy theory. This isn't speculation.

This is documented, verified, and admitted to by the people who did it. It's been written about in books, covered in congressional hearings and investigated by federal agencies. And yet, it remains one of the most underreported chapters in American history. So tonight, we're going to tell you the full story. From the very beginning, how it started, how it grew into something monstrous, who was involved, who profited, and what happened to the men who were left behind when the cameras turned off and the labs closed down. This is the real horror of Holmesburg Prison, and I want to be clear about something

before we go any further. I'm not telling you this story to shock you. I'm not telling it for entertainment. I'm telling it because the men who lived through it have spent decades trying to get someone to listen. And because the institutions that profited from their suffering have spent just as long trying to make sure you never hear about it. So sit back. Pay attention. And let's give these men the hearing they've been asking for since the 1970s. To understand what happened inside those walls, you've got to understand the place itself, because Holmesburg didn't become a house of horrors overnight. The cruelty was built into the foundation, layer by layer, over decades.

And the experiments, as horrifying as they were, didn't happen in a vacuum. They happened because the conditions were already there. The indifference was already there. The men inside those walls had already been written off by the world outside. Holmesburg Prison opened in 1896. It was built to relieve overcrowding at Philadelphia's older Moia Mencing Prison, a facility that had been bursting at the seams for years. The design of Holmesburg was modeled after Eastern State Penitentiary,

that famous hub and spoke layout, where cell blocks radiated out from a central surveillance point like the spokes of a wheel. The original philosophy was something they called separate penal confinement, isolation. The idea was that prisoners should be kept apart from one another, left alone to sit with their crimes and reflect on what they'd done. It didn't take long for that philosophy to collapse under the weight of reality. By the 1920s, Holmesburg was already overcrowded, with three men crammed into cells that had been designed for one.

The conditions were grim. Prisoners were allowed about 20 minutes of exercise a day and spent the rest of their time locked in their tiny cells. The ventilation was poor. The sanitation was worse. The food was barely edible, the same monotonous rotation of cheap starches and processed meat, day after day, week after week.

A 1922 newspaper expose in the evening public ledger called it the worst prison in the United States. And at that point, the prison was only 26 years old. It had already become a place defined by overcrowding, violence, and institutional neglect. Guards ran the cell blocks with physical physical, force. There was no rehabilitation to speak of. No meaningful work programs. No education. Just men stacked on top of each other in cramped stone cells, watched over by corrections

officers who viewed them as less than human. If you stepped out of line, you got beaten. If you protested, you got thrown into isolation. If you caused too much trouble, well, there was always the Klondike, and that was just the beginning. In August of 19, In 1938, something happened at Holmesburg that would make headlines across the country and give the world its first real glimpse of the brutality that defined the place. The inmates had gone on a hunger strike. About 650 of them, roughly half the prison population, refused to eat. They were protesting the food, and not just the quality, though that was bad enough. It was the monotony.

The same hamburgers, the same spaghetti and cheese, the same bologna and fried eggplant, over and over again. The inmates wanted some say in what they were being fed. They wanted representative elections on their cell blocks. They wanted to be treated at a basic level, like human beings with voices. The prison superintendent, a 60-year-old former police official named William Mills, wasn't having it. He told reporters that the inmates' demands were deliberately framed to be unacceptable. He said there was only one committee running the prison, a committee of one, and that was him.

23 of the men identified as strike leaders were pulled from the general population and sent to a place the inmates called the Klondike. It was a small, isolated building on the prison grounds with about 12 cramped cells, each measuring roughly 6 by 9 feet. It was regularly used for punishment, and the men who'd been there before knew what it meant to end up inside. But this time, the punishment was something else entirely. The guards closed the windows. They turned off the water, and then they cranked up the steam radiators. This was August in Philadelphia, during a heat wave.

Temperatures outside were already in the high 90s. Inside the Klondike, the temperature climbed past 100, then passed 150. Witnesses later said it reached close to 200 degrees. The men inside screamed. They cried out. They begged the guards to open the windows, to give them water.

To let them out. The guards laughed. When Monday morning came and the doors were finally opened, four inmates were dead. Their bodies were swollen, discolored, blue-black in appearance, as if they'd been boiled. Several others were unconscious and barely alive.

The county coroner who arrived at the scene said the men had been scalded to death. He compared the spectacle to something out of a nightmare, describing the corpses as looking like they'd drowned. Their skin puffed and darkened, beyond recognition. Initially, the prison tried to cover it up. Officials told the press that the inmates had fought among themselves and killed each other, but the coroner, a man named Charles Hirsch, wouldn't let it go. He pushed for an investigation. He put his own career on the line to do it.

Pennsylvania's governor visited the prison, and what he saw shook him so badly that he went straight to the press and said the newspapers had actually understated the horror of what had happened. He called the perpetrators the cruelest sadists who ever lived. Ten prison officials were eventually indicted. Two were convicted of involuntary manslaughter and given sentences of one to three years. The Klondike was eventually torn down in the 1970s. But here's what matters about this story. The bake oven murders, as they became known, happened in 1938.

The medical experiments wouldn't begin until 1951, just 13 years apart. The culture inside Holmesburg, the dehumanization, the casual brutality, the complete indifference to suffering. That didn't change just because a couple of guards went to prison for a year or two. It was embedded in the institution, and when a man like Albert Klegman walked through those gates and saw opportunity instead of tragedy, the conditions were perfect. It's also worth noting what else was going on at Holmesburg during this period. The prison wasn't just overcrowded and violent. It was a place of near total despair. The inmates had almost nothing, no meaningful work, no education, no counseling or rehabilitation.

Most of them were pretrial detainees, men who hadn't even been convicted yet, but couldn't afford bail. They were sitting in cells, waiting, with nothing to do and no money to their names. Some had families on the outside who couldn't visit because they couldn't afford the bus fare. Some had been abandoned entirely. A 1968 report, the result of an extensive two-year investigation by the Philadelphia Police Commissioner's Office and the district attorney, documented hundreds of cases of inmate rape inside Holmesburg and Philadelphia's other prisons. Hundreds. Sexual violence was so pervasive, so entrenched that it had become a structural feature of life behind bars. The strong preyed on the weak, and the guards either looked the other way or participated in the exploitation, by assigning vulnerable inmates to cells with known predators as a form of punishment or control.

This was the world these men lived in. This was the environment into which Albert Kligman walked in 1951 and saw not human suffering, but scientific opportunity. This was the soil in which the experiments took root. Albert Kligman was born in Philadelphia on March 17, 1916, to Jewish immigrant parents. He was, by almost every account, brilliant. He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1939, and then a doctorate in botany three years later.

His specialty was fungi, specifically the way fungal organisms interacted with human skin and tissue. In 1947, he completed his medical degree, also at Penn, and turned his attention to dermatology. It was the natural intersection of his two worlds, the science of fungi and the practice of medicine. and he pursued it with the kind of relentless ambition that would define his entire career. By the early 1950s, Kligman had established himself as a rising star in the field. He'd published numerous papers on dermatological topics and had built a reputation as someone who wasn't afraid to push boundaries in his research. He was confident. Some colleagues would later use a different word, arrogant. He reportedly told his students that the rules didn't apply to genius.

He had a way about him that commanded attention, a mix of charisma and certainty that made people defer to his judgment, even when they probably shouldn't have. And it's important to understand the broader medical culture he was trained in. This was the late 1940s and early 1950s. The medical establishment at the time had very different ideas about who could be used in research and under what conditions. There were no institutional review boards. There was no robust system of oversight. The Nuremberg Code had been drafted in 1947 in the wake of the Nazi medical atrocities, and its principles were clear.

Voluntary consent is absolutely essential. Experiments should be conducted to avoid all unnecessary suffering, and subjects should be free to end their participation at any time. But in practice, the Code was treated more as an aspirational document than a binding set of rules. American researchers broadly believe the Nuremberg Code applied to what, the Nazis had done, not to what they themselves were doing. It was a moral framework for other people's crimes. Cligman was a product of that culture. He was trained in an environment where using vulnerable populations, the disabled, the institutionalized, the incarcerated, for medical

research wasn't just tolerated, it was standard practice. Researchers saw these groups as convenient, controllable pools of subjects. The ethical questions that seem obvious to us now, simply weren't asked. Or if they were asked, they were dismissed as obstacles to progress. None of that excuses what Kligman did, but it helps explain how it was possible. How a man with a medical degree from one of the best universities in the country could walk into a prison and see human beings as raw material. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. It wasn't an aberration. It was a logical extension of a system that had already decided

certain lives were worth less than others. In 1951, Cligman received a phone call that would change everything. It came from the pharmacist at Holmesburg Prison. The prison was dealing with a widespread outbreak of athletes' foot among the inmates, and the pharmacist had come across one of Cligman's published articles on fungal infections while looking for a treatment. He asked if Cligman would be willing to come to the prison and take a look. Cligman agreed. What happened next has been recounted many times, and Kligman himself told the story more than once in interviews over the years. He described walking through the gates of Homesburg and entering the cell blocks for the first time. He saw the inmates, hundreds of them, confined, controlled, their diets and routines

standardized by the nature of incarceration itself. He would later say that a thought struck him that would shape the next 23 years of his career and the lives of thousands of men. He later told a Philadelphia newspaper reporter what went through his mind in that moment. He said all he could see before him were acres of skin. He compared it to a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time. A doctor. A man who had taken an oath to do no harm. Walking into a place where human beings were locked in cages. And his first thought wasn't about their suffering. It wasn't about the conditions they were living in. It wasn't about the athlete's foot he'd been called in to treat. His first thought was about what he could use them for, and he didn't waste any time.

Kligman later admitted in a 1986 interview that he began going to the prison regularly after that first visit, even though he had no authorization to do so. He said it was years before the authorities even knew he was conducting experiments on the inmates. He said, informed consent was unheard of at the time. No one asked him what he was doing. And then he said something that would become one of the most damning quotes in the history of medical ethics. He called it a wonderful time. The experiment started small, almost innocent, if you didn't think too hard about the context. Kligman's initial work at Holmesburg focused on his area of expertise, dermatology. He was studying fungal infections, particularly ringworm and

athlete's foot, and he needed test subjects. The inmates of Holmesburg with their controlled environment and their desperate need for money were ideal. One of his early studies involved deliberately infecting inmates' feet with enormous quantities of fungi, then making them wear rubber boots continuously for a week to see how the infection spread. He later wrote that the prison environment gave him a newfound appreciation for ringworm, a statement that tells you a lot about where his priorities lay. From there, the scope of the experiments expanded. Cligman began partnering with pharmaceutical companies that needed human subjects for their product testing. The Food and Drug administration required a three-phase testing process for new drugs and consumer products

before they could be marketed to the public. And at the time, incarcerated people made up nearly 100% of the phase one experimental population across the entire country. Homsburg quickly became one of the biggest testing sites in the nation. The standard procedure was what inmates called the patch test. Strips of hospital tape would be stuck to a man's upper back, forming a grid of about 20 squares. On each square, a different substance was applied, cosmetic creams, moisturizers, sun-tan lotions, shampoos, detergents, you name it. Then the researchers would hit the area with a sunlamp and check the skin at different temperatures for peeling, burning, and blistering. A 1964 issue of medical news reported that nine out of ten prisoners

at Holmesburg were being used as medical test subjects. And the money. That was the hook. That was what kept the whole thing running. If you were an inmate at Holmesburg and you were lucky enough to get a job on the cell block, you might make 15 or 25 cents a day pushing a broom. But if you signed up for one of Kligman's experiments, you could make anywhere from $10 to $300, sometimes even more, depending on what was being tested. In a prison system where inmates could end their pretrial detention by posting 10% of their bail,

a few experiments could literally buy your freedom. One former inmate described it like dangling a carrot in front of a rabbit. The men were desperate. They had no real income, no resources, no power. And here comes this doctor from a prestigious university, wearing a white coat, telling them no harm would come to them, telling them they'd be well taken care of, offering them more money in a week than they'd earn in a year of prison labor.

The inmates trusted the doctors. They thought they were working with principled medical professionals from one of the best universities in the country. They had no reason to think otherwise. Most of them were young, poorly educated, and unfamiliar with the world of medical research. They didn't understand what informed consent meant. Most of them never even saw a consent form,

and those who did were given documents that said nothing about what chemicals they'd be exposed to or what the potential side effects might be. One former inmate, Leotis Jones, described the situation with painful clarity, He said he was in prison with a low bail, and the experiments were the fastest way to earn enough money to post it. It wasn't that he wanted to be a test subject. He wanted to go home.

And somebody offered him a way to do that, so he signed whatever they put in front of him. He didn't read the fine print, because there was no fine print. Nobody explained anything. You showed up. They did things to your body, and they paid you. That was the entire transaction, and the researchers knew this. They knew these men weren't making free informed choices. They knew the payment structure was designed to be irresistible to people with no other options.

Cligman himself once said that for a modest fee, the prison could provide ideal opportunities for research. That word, opportunities, not subjects, not participants, opportunities. The language tells you everything about how he saw the arrangement. There was also an unspoken social contract at work. If you turned down the experiments, you went back to making 15 cents a day. You went back to the boredom, the violence, the grinding monotony of prison life with nothing to show for it. The men who participated had a status within the prison economy that the others didn't. They could buy things at the commissary.

They could afford small comforts that made incarceration slightly more bearable. Saying no to the experiments meant giving all that up. In a very real sense, the choice wasn't really a choice. choice at all. And here's the part that makes the whole thing even more troubling. The overwhelming majority of these men were black. At the time, Holmesburg housed around 1,200 to 1,500 inmates. Nearly 9 out of 10 of them were black. Most of the rest were Puerto Rican. The doctors running the experiments? All white. All wearing white lab coats with MD or Ph.D. after their names. The power dynamic was absolute, and it was exploited without

hesitation. As the 1950s rolled on, Kligman's operation at Holmesburg grew into something enormous. He was no longer a lone dermatologist treating athletes' foot. He turned the prison into what author Alan Hornblum would later describe as one of America's largest non-therapeutic human research factories. By the early 1960s, Kligman had 33 different sponsors funding his experiments. That included some of the biggest names in American industry and government. Johnson Johnson, Dow Chemical, the United States Army, and the CIA. The range of what was being done to the men inside those walls is staggering. Inmates were inoculated with viruses that cause herpes simplex, herpes zoster, and warts. They were deliberately infected with stifilococcus bacteria.

They were given condoloma acumenitum, which causes genital warts. They were exposed to candida al-Bicons, a yeast that causes severe infections. They had their fingernails ripped out as part of studies on nail fungal infections. They had foreign bodies implanted under their skin. Their skin was burned, irradiated and blistered with ultraviolet light. These weren't theoretical risks that subjects were warned about in advance. These were the intended outcomes. The experiments were designed to cause harm.

That was the point. The researchers wanted to see what happened when human skin was a source. salted day after day, with substances that had no business being anywhere near a living person. And the methods were often crude, even by the standards of the time. One study involved infecting men's feet with fungi and then sealing them inside rubber boots for a week straight to create the perfect environment for the infection to spread. Imagine wearing rubber boots without removing them for seven days. Your feet swelling, the fungus growing, the itching turning to the,

burning and you can't take them off because that's what the researchers need from you. In another set of experiments, Kligman had inmates fingernails ripped out so he could study the fungal infections that developed underneath, ripped out, not carefully removed under anesthesia, just pulled from the nail bed. Men described the pain as blinding, and then, with the exposed bloody nail bed still raw and open, the researchers introduced fungi to see what would happen. There were studies where researchers deliberately burned the skin on inmates' faces and backs with powerful chemical agents. There were studies involving the implantation of foreign objects beneath the skin to observe the body's

inflammatory response. There were studies where near-lethal doses of tritinoin, the active ingredient in what would eventually become retinae, were applied to the skin and ingested orally to measure toxicity thresholds. Near-lethal. That means they were testing how much of the stuff they could put into a human body before it killed them. And the biopsies. Constant biopsies. Chunks of skin cut away from the test areas so the researchers could examine the tissue under a microscope. The men were walking around with open wounds on their backs, their arms, their faces, covered in bandages,

looking like they'd been in some kind of accident. That's actually how Alan Hornblum first became aware of the experiments. years later, when he was working as the director of adult literacy in the Philadelphia prison system. He saw inmates covered in bandages and thought there'd been a riot. A guard told him the truth. Those men were test subjects. They were renting their bodies for cash. And it wasn't just Kligman. He brought in other researchers, other departments, other institutions. He'd essentially created a marketplace. If you were a pharmaceutical company that needed to test a new product, you could go to Holmesburg.

If you were a government agency that needed human subjects for something you couldn't legally or ethically do anywhere else, you could go to Holmesburg. Cligman was the gatekeeper, and for a fee, he'd make it happen. His own corporation, a company called Ivy Research, was one of the vehicles through which these deals were arranged. The money flowed in from every direction, corporations, the military, the federal government, and Cligman sat at the center of all of it, growing wealth. and more powerful with every new contract.

Meanwhile, the inmates were earning a dollar a day. Maybe a dollar and 50 cents if they were lucky. Some of the more involved experiments paid better, 30, 50, even $100. But even those higher payouts were a fraction of what the researchers and their sponsors were making. The men were, in every meaningful sense of the word, being exploited. In 1966, the experiments at Holmesburg took a darker turn. And that's saying something, because they were already pretty dark. Dow Chemical, the Michigan-based industrial giant, had a problem.

Workers at its herbicide plant in Midland, Michigan, were developing chloracin, a severe and disfiguring skin condition caused by exposure to dioxin, which was a contaminant in the herbicides Dow was producing. One of those herbicides would later become infamous as Agent Orange. The chemical defoliant the United States was spraying across the jungles of Vietnam. Now, if you don't know what dioxin is, here's the short version. It's one of the most toxic chemicals ever created by industrial processes. Even in incredibly small quantities, dioxin can cause severe skin eruptions, liver damage, immune system dysfunction, and cancer.

It accumulates in the body's fat tissue and stays there. It doesn't wash out. It doesn't break down. Once it's in you, it's in you. And in Vietnam, where the U's U.S. military was spraying Agent Orange from airplanes over millions of acres of jungle and farmland. Entire populations were being exposed. The effects would be felt for generations. Children born decades later would show birth defects linked to their parents and grandparents' exposure. That's how persistent and how destructive this chemical is. Dow needed to understand what dioxin did to human skin. They needed to find the minimum amount of the chemical that would trigger a reaction, and they were willing to pay for the answers. They went to Cligman. The contract was worth

$10,000. Dow's protocol called for applying small doses of dioxin, between 0.2 and 16 micrograms, to the foreheads and backs of incarcerated men. It was a limited study, carefully calibrated to the specific questions Dow wanted answered. Cligman had other ideas. He started the study as Dow instructed, applying the low doses to around 60 inmates. The results were unremarkable, no significant reactions. Kligman wasn't satisfied with that, so he made a decision on his own, without authorization from Dow, to dramatically increase the dosage. He applied 7,500 micrograms of dioxin to the skin of 10 prisoners every other day for an entire month. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

That dosage was 468 times higher than what Dow had authorized. To put it another way, the men in Cligman's study were being exposed to dioxin at a level that was nearly 500 times beyond what anyone had agreed to. The results were exactly what you'd expect. Eight of the ten men developed severe acne lesions. In three cases, those lesions progressed into inflamed, pustular blisters that covered the application sites, and Cligman's own notes reveal something that's almost impossible to read without feeling sick.

He wrote that the lesions lasted for four to seven months, and that no effort was made to speed healing by active treatment. He deliberately left the men untreated so he could observe the progression of the damage. When Dow Chemical found out what Cligman had done, they were reportedly stunned. He'd blown past their protocol by a factor of nearly 500. He'd failed to answer their actual research question. Because the gap between 16 micrograms and 7,500 micrograms was so enormous that the data was essentially useless. And he'd left 70 men, at minimum, with chronic pain and lasting injury.

But here's the truly chilling part. Cligman didn't keep good records of who had been in the study. When the Environmental Protection Agency tried to investigate the dioxin experiments years later, in the early 1980s, they couldn't identify the men who'd been exposed. Cligman claimed no records of the participants' identities had been kept. Seventy men at least had been dosed with one of the most toxic chemicals known to science, and nobody bothered to write down their names. The New York Times ran an article about the missing subjects,

noting that somewhere in the United States were as many as 70 men who could help researchers understand the long-term effects of dioxin exposure on humans. But they couldn't be found. Because to the people running the experiment, they hadn't been people. They'd been test subjects, anonymous bodies, acres of skin,

and Cligman? When asked about the potential consequences for those 70 men, he offered a remark that belongs in a museum of medical arrogance. He said all those people could have leukemia now, and then added the odds

were about one chance in 20 billion. The dioxin experiments were horrifying, but they were only part of the story. Because around the same time, Kligman was burning men's skin with Agent Orange chemicals. Something else was happening inside Holmesburg, something connected to the deepest, most secretive corridors of the United States government. Between 1964 and 1968, the United States Army paid $386,486 to Kligman and his associate, a physician named Herbert W. Copeland to conduct experiments on 320 inmates at Holmesburg Prison.

The experiments involved mind-altering drugs, psychotropic substances, hallucinogens, and the purpose wasn't medical. It was military. The Army wanted to find what they called the M-Med 50, the minimum effective dose of various substances needed to mentally disable 50% of a given population. In plain English, they were trying to figure out how much of a drug you'd have to give to half the enemy soldiers on a battlefield to make them unable to fight. This was happening during the Cold War, and the research was connected to a broader web of government programs aimed at developing chemical and psychological weapons. The CIA's notorious project M.K. Ultra, which began in 1953 and ran for roughly two decades, was the most infamous of these programs. M.K. Ultra's stated goal was to develop techniques for mind control, interrogation, and behavior modification, using drugs, sensory deprivation,

electroshock, and other methods. It was overseen by a CIA chemist named Sidney Gottlieb, and it operated through a sprawling network of universities, hospitals, prisons, and secret black sites around the world. The scope of M.K. Ultra was almost incomprehensible. The program received more than $25 million in funding and involved hundreds of experiments at 80 different institutions. The CIA purchased the world's entire supply of LSD

at one point, paying $240,000 for it, and then distributed it to hospitals, clinics, prisons, and research foundations across the country, often through front organizations that concealed the CIA's involvement. The test subjects ranged from military volunteers to mental patients, to drug addicts, to prostitutes, and their clients at CIA run safe houses in New York and San Francisco. As one agency officer later put it, they were testing on people who couldn't fight back. Holmesburg was part of that network. The experiments on the 320 inmates weren't simple pill studies. These men were given substances they didn't understand, and doses that hadn't been tested, for purposes they were never told about. Some of the drugs were hallucinogenic. Some were

designed to cause confusion, disorientation, and psychological distress. The goal was to determine the minimum dosage needed to incapacitate 50% of a population. In other words, the Army wanted to know exactly how much of a given drug you'd need to make half the people in a room unable to function. That's a weapons question, not a medical one. And the men who provided the answers were inmates who thought they were participating in routine medical research. Cligman and Copeland weren't rogue operators working without oversight. They had a contract, a substantial one. $386,000 spread over four years.

That money came from the... United States Army and the research was fed into the broader apparatus of American military and intelligence operations. The substances being tested at Holmesburg were being evaluated for potential battlefield use. The inmates weren't patients. They were guinea pigs for a weapons program and the effects were devastating. Herbert Rice, one of the inmates who survived the experiments, later described what happened to him. He said the drugs caused him to hallucinate. He said the psychological torment followed him for decades after he left Homsburg. He spent time in psychiatric hospitals.

His marriage fell apart. He lost contact with his children. And when he finally sought mental health treatment in the 1990s and told the doctors about the experiments, they didn't believe him. They thought he was delusional. Imagine. A man tells his doctor that the government gave him experimental drugs in prison, and the doctor assumes he's lost his mind. That's how far-fetched the whole thing sounded to people who hadn't lived through it. It was too horrible to be true, except it was true. Every word of it. Another inmate, a man named Edward Anthony, whose story was later documented in detail by Alan Hornblum in his book sentenced to science, became what Hornblum called a particularly unlucky experimental lab rat. Anthony was by his own admission functionally illiterate.

He'd grown up poor. He'd been in and out of trouble his whole life. And when he ended up at Holmesburg, he saw the experiments the same way a lot of the inmates did as a way to make money, a way to have something in a place where you had nothing. He signed up for study after study. He was probed with needles transferring mysterious solutions into his body. He was bathed in chemicals he couldn't name. He was paid to swallow experimental compounds, pills and capsules whose contents he was never told. He was, in his own words, a dollar a day human vessel.

willing to endure whatever was done to him because that dollar was more than he'd earn doing anything else in the prison. The physical problems Anthony accumulated over the course of his time as a test subject were considerable. But the psychological damage was even worse. He developed health problems that doctors couldn't explain, conditions that didn't match any standard diagnosis. And because he couldn't articulate what had been done to him, because he didn't know the names of the chemicals or the purposes of the studies, medical professionals on the outside had no framework for treating him.

He was a man walking around with injuries inflicted by some of the most prestigious research institutions in America, and nobody could figure out what was wrong with him, because the people who'd caused the damage had destroyed the records. Anthony's story, told in his own words through extensive interviews with Hornblum, is one of the most wrenching accounts to come out of Holmesburg. It strips away the clinical language and the institutional justifications and shows, you what this looked like from the inside. A confused, uneducated man in a cage, being used by brilliant, highly credentialed professionals who saw him as nothing more than a

resource to be consumed. And here's something that makes this even more unsettling. The mind control experiments at Holmesburg weren't conducted in the regular prison facility. They were held in separate trailers, isolated from the main building, where what happened inside was harder for anyone to observe or document. The secrecy was deliberate. The Army and the CIA didn't want people asking questions about what was being done to these men. Cligman and Copeland later claimed they were unaware of any long-term health effects that drugs might have on the prisoners.

But documents that surfaced years later showed that wasn't the case. They knew. Or at the very least, they had every reason to know. And they kept going anyway. The Army experiments dealt with the mind. The Dow Chemical Experiments dealt with the skin. And then there were the experiments that dealt with something even more unsettling. What happens when you put radioactive material on a living human body?

During the height of the Cold War, the United States government was intensely interested in radioactive material. The arms race with the Soviet Union had made nuclear science a national priority, and that interest extended into the medical realm. Cligman saw an opportunity. He applied for a byproduct material license from the United States of the United States of Atomic Energy Commission, which authorized him to store radioactive isotopes for use in testing on Holmesburg prisoners. The research was overseen by the dermatology department at the University of Pennsylvania, which gave it the stamp of institutional legitimacy. Let's pause on that

for a second. The Atomic Energy Commission. This is the federal agency responsible for overseeing the nation's nuclear weapons program and regulating the use of radioactive material, and they issued a license to a dermatologist to use radioactive substances on incarcerated men in a city jail. That's how normal this kind of thing had become. It wasn't a covert operation. It wasn't hidden from the bureaucracy. Kligman filed the paperwork, got his approval, and went to work. The machinery of government processed the request like any other.

One of Kligman's radioactive protocols involved labeling human skin with radioactive substances and then measuring how quickly the skin cells turned over. The studies used radioactive sulfur, radioactive hydrogen in the form of tritiated thymidine, and radioactive carbon. Anywhere from 50 to 200 inmates were subjected to these tests. The formal title of one study gives you a sense of how clinical the whole thing was made to sound. Studies of human epidermal turnover time using S-35-sistine and H3 thymidine, and of cutaneous permeability using C-14 testosterone and corticosteroid.

Stripped of the jargon, what that means is they were putting radioactive substances on people's skin and into their bodies to see what happened. Cligman later claimed the radioactive material posed no threat because it was removed from the skin within minutes. But that claim was contradicted by the men who lived through it, and it was contradicted by the basic science of what radioactive exposure does to living tissue. Even brief exposure to certain isotopes can damage cells at the DNA level. And the inmates weren't given dosimeters or protective equipment. They weren't monitored for long-term effects. They were exposed, observed in the short term, and sent back to their cells.

Herbert Rice, who we mentioned earlier, recalled experiments where they applied some kind of radiation to his back. He said his skin felt like leather for three to four months afterward. Another inmate described pills he was given that contained what he was told was some type of living organism. He developed severe gastrointestinal problems that required multiple surgeries to repair. The use of radioactive thymidine in the experiments was eventually disapproved in 1965. But by then, the damage had been done. And like the dioxin experiments, the records were incomplete. The identities of many subjects were never properly documented.

and follow-up care was non-existent. And then there was Johnson and Johnson. For decades, the full extent of Johnson and Johnson's involvement with the Holmesburg experiments remained hidden. People knew about Dow Chemical. They knew about the Army and the CIA. But it wasn't until court documents were unsealed during talc-related cancer lawsuits in the early 2020s

that the public learned about Johnson and Johnson's role. In 1971, Johnson and Johnson funded a study at Holmesburg, in which Kligman recruited 10 prisoners to receive injections in their lower backs. The injections contain two types of asbestos, tremolite and chrysotile, along with talc, the mineral that formed the base of Johnson's baby powder. The purpose of the study was to compare how the substances affected human skin. Chrysotile asbestos is the most dangerous form of the mineral. It's been classified as a known human carcinogen by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the International Agency for

Research on Cancer. And in Cligman's study, the chrysotile asbestos produced the most significant reaction, causing granulomas, raised clusters of inflamed cells to form on the inmate's skin. The inmates were paid as little as $10 for their participation. They were not told they were being injected with a substance known to cause cancer. In a separate study, also funded by Johnson and Johnson. Fifty Holmesburg inmates, 44 of whom were black, had talc from different storage containers applied to their skin and covered with dressings. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The purpose was to see whether the type of container affected the skin reaction. Kligman noted in his report that neither sample caused a reaction.

But the larger question, why Johnson and Johnson was testing asbestos on prisoners in the first place, would take on new significance decades later. By the 2020s, Johnson and Johnson was facing more than 35,000 lawsuits from people, mostly women, who claimed that the company's talc-based baby powder had caused ovarian cancer and mesothelioma due to asbestos contamination. When the Holmesburg asbestos experiments came to light during those trials, one plaintiff's attorney asked the question that many people were already thinking. Why would Johnson and Johnson pay a dermatologist to inject asbestos into prisoners unless they were worried that their talc was contaminated. Leotis Jones was one of the prisoners who signed up for some of Cligman's studies. He couldn't remember

specifically whether he'd been a Johnson and Johnson test subject. But his daughter, Adrienne Jones Alston, has spoken publicly about what the experiments did to her father. She described seeing her father's back for the first time when she was four or five years old. She said it scared her so badly she ran to her mother and told her that Daddy had turned into a monster. Jones died in 2018 at the age of 74. He spent his life dealing with the scars, both physical and psychological, of what had been done to him inside Holmesburg. He was one of the few former inmates who successfully sued,

reaching a $40,000 settlement with the city of Philadelphia in 1986. $40,000 for a lifetime of suffering. Through all of this, one thing remained. constant, Cligman's ambition. He wasn't just running experiments for other people. He was building his own empire. And in 1967, that ambition produced something that would make him and the University of Pennsylvania very wealthy. Working with two colleagues James Fulton and Gerd Plowig, Cligman developed and patented a topical medication for acne called Tritinoin. You probably know it by its brand name, Retin A. Retin A was first licensed to Johnson and

Johnson, which began selling it in 1971. It was remarkably effective. Dermatologists started prescribing it widely, and it quickly became one of the most popular acne treatments on the market. But the story didn't end there. About a decade later, Kligman discovered that Retin A also had significant anti-aging properties. It reduced wrinkles, smooth skin texture, and reversed some of the visible effects of sun damage. A new patent was issued, And the money really started flowing. There was a legal fight, of course. The University of Pennsylvania argued that the patent rights belonged to the school,

not to Kligman personally. An acrimonious lawsuit followed, and in 1992, an agreement was reached to share the royalties with the medical school. But here's the thing. Retinae was developed at Holmesburg Prison. The testing that led to the discovery, the refinement, the patent, it was all done on the skin of incarcerated men, who were being paid a dollar a day to serve as human guinea pigs.

Cligman and the University of Pennsylvania made millions. Johnson and Johnson made hundreds of millions. The drug generated enormous wealth for everyone involved, except the men whose bodies had been used to create it. And here's the cruel irony. Walk into any dermatologist's office today, and you'll probably see retinae, or one of its generic equivalents,

prescribed to patients who are paying good money for smoother, younger-looking skin. It's one of the most widely used skin care medications in the world. People buy it at pharmacies. Influencers talk about it on social media. Dermatologists recommend it to patients who want to look better as they age. It's become a prestige product associated with self-care and beauty and wellness. Nobody in that chain, not the manufacturers, not the retailers, not the consumers,

is thinking about the men of Holmesburg. Nobody is thinking about the skin that was burned and blistered. and biopsied, so the formula could be perfected. Nobody is thinking about the fact that the road to this billion-dollar product ran directly through a prison where black men were paid a dollar a day to let a dermatologist do things to their bodies that would land anyone else in prison. Herbert Rice, one of the survivors, put it as plainly as anyone could. He said retinae was discovered and made at Holmesburg Prison.

He said they made millions and millions of dollars off the skin on our backs. By the early 1970s, the world was starting to change, slowly, reluctantly, but undeniably. In 1972, the Associated Press broke the story of the Tuskegee Syphilis study. The infamous 40-year government experiment in which black men in Alabama were deliberately left untreated for syphilis, so researchers could study the disease's progression. The public outcry was enormous. Congressional hearings followed. And suddenly, the idea of the idea of the disease.

using vulnerable populations as unwitting test subjects wasn't something people could look away from anymore. The Tuskegee story put pressure on every institution in the country that had been involved in similar practices, and Holmesburg was near the top of that list. In 1974, the city of Philadelphia officially banned medical testing at Holmesburg prison. The experiments ended, just like that. After 23 years, it was over. Not because the researchers had a crisis, of conscience. Not because the institutions that profited from the experiments decided it was wrong. It ended because the political environment had shifted, public opinion had turned, and the people in charge decided it was no longer safe to continue. But the end of the experiments didn't mean

the end of Holmesburg's troubles, not by a long stretch. The prison continued to operate for another two decades, and the violence inside its walls only intensified. In 1970, Roe's, Rove's. roughly a hundred inmates rioted, arming themselves with meat cleavers, boning knives, makeshift pitchforks, and table legs. They destroyed the dining hall and attacked both guards and other inmates. Nearly a hundred people were injured. The uprising was connected to the same conditions that had plagued the prison for decades.

Overcrowding, brutality, and a complete absence of basic human dignity. In 1973, something happened that was almost unprecedented in American corrections history. Two inmates, members of the Nation of Islam, stabbed the warden and his deputy to death inside the prison. It was the first time in American history that a warden had been killed inside his own facility by inmates. The current county jail, the current From Hold Correctional Center, is named after those two murdered officials. The prison limped on until 1995 when it was finally decommissioned. But even after it closed, the city used it sporadically for prisoner overflow, including in the year 2000 when it held protesters arrested at the Republican National

Convention. Through all of this, the experiments that had defined the prison for more than two decades were barely mentioned. Kligman walked away from Holmesburg without consequence. He continued his career at the University of Pennsylvania. He continued to be celebrated in the field of dermatology. to receive awards and accolades from the institutions that should have been holding him accountable. He lived comfortably. He lived well. And the men he'd experimented on were left to deal with the fallout alone. And the inmates? The men who'd been burned and blistered and irradiated and injected and dosed with chemicals they didn't understand? They were on their own. Most of them didn't even know the full extent of what had been done to them. They carried scars and chronic conditions and

psychological trauma, but they had no medical records, no documentation, no proof. The records had been destroyed or were never kept in the first place. It would take another 24 years before the full story reached the public, but pieces of it had started to emerge earlier, and fits and starts. In 1979, the Philadelphia Inquirer obtained some 1800 pages of Pentagon records and published a bombshell report detailing the contract between the University of Pennsylvania. and the United States Army. The article laid out how more than 300 inmates had been used to test mind control drugs and chemical warfare agents.

It reported that inmates had complained bitterly about side effects, including inflammation that lasted weeks and eventually broke the willingness of the test subjects to continue. That detail alone should have stopped people in their tracks. The experiments were so painful that even men who were desperate for money eventually refused to go on. Two years later, in 1981, the Inquirer followed up with another piece. This one focused on the Dow chemical dioxin tests. The article revealed how little information the 70 inmates had been given when they signed up.

The consent forms they'd signed never mentioned the chemicals being used. Never mentioned the word dioxin. Never mentioned the potential for long-term injury. The men had signed blank checks with their bodies and hadn't even known it. These articles generated some attention. but not the sustained public outrage that the story deserved. The experiments had ended years earlier. The men involved were scattered, many of them still incarcerated or struggling on the outside.

There was no organized movement demanding answers, and the institutions responsible had every incentive to let the story die. And for a while, that's exactly what happened. Then, in 1998, a man named Alan Hornblum published a book called Acres of Skin, human experiments at Holmesburg Prison. Hornblum had worked as the director of adult literacy for Philadelphia's prison system, and during that time, he'd started noticing something strange, inmates with bandages on their backs, men with scars that didn't look like they came from

fights or accidents, and when he asked questions, the answers he got were disturbing. The prisoners told him about the experiments. They told him about the patch tests and the injections and the pills. they told him about Cligman and the University of Pennsylvania. And Hornblum, who had a background in criminal justice and a natural instinct for investigation, decided to dig deeper. He gave up his job to do the research full-time. He spent five years tracking down former inmates, former researchers, former prison staff. He pulled documents. He interviewed dozens of people.

Many of the medical professionals who'd been involved didn't want to talk. They hung up on him. They cursed him out. They begged him not to use their names. There was real fear there. These were people who knew what they'd been a part of, and they didn't want it coming back to haunt them. The University of Pennsylvania, for its part, was not cooperative.

Penn is one of the most powerful institutions in Philadelphia. It's a highly acclaimed Ivy League University that employs more people than any other entity in the city. They did not want to acknowledge their role in what had happened at Holmesburg. For years after Hornblum's book came out, Kligman and the university maintained that they hadn't done anything wrong, that the experiments were consistent with the norms of the era, that the inmates had been volunteers,

that nobody had been harmed. But the former inmates were willing to talk. They wanted to talk. For decades, they'd been carrying these stories around with no one to listen, no one to believe them. They'd tried to tell doctors, and the doctors thought they were making it up. They'd tried to tell family members, and the details were so outlandish that people couldn't process them.

How do you explain to someone that the government injected you with a cancer-causing chemical, or that the CIA gave you drugs to scramble your brain, or that a doctor from an Ivy League University ripped out your fingernails to study what grew back? It sounds like the plot of a movie. Except it wasn't a movie. It was their lives. And now, finally, someone was asking. The book caused a sensation. It was covered by Good Morning America, CBS Evening News, CNN, the BBC, and newspapers across the country and around the world. For the first time, the general public was hearing the full scope of what had happened inside Homsburg.

And the title of the book? It came from Kligman's own words, acres of skin. In the year 2000, approximately 300 former Homsburg study participants filed a civil lawsuit against. Cligman, the University of Pennsylvania, the city of Philadelphia, Dow Chemical, and Johnson and Johnson. They alleged that they had been exposed to infectious diseases, radioactive isotopes, and psychotropic drugs like LSD, without having given informed consent. They argued that their so-called consent had been coerced, because the experimenters had dangled money in front of desperate men and failed to disclose the potential consequences. The case was heard in federal district court, and it was thrown out.

The court ruled that the statute of limitations had expired. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision, finding that the plaintiffs had waited too long to file suit. The court wrote that it was simply not reasonable to believe that the men were unaware of the facts underlying the litigation many years before bringing suit. That reasoning is worth sitting with for a moment. The court essentially said that the men should have known soon,

sooner, that they should have figured out, on their own, with no medical records, no education in biochemistry, and no documentation of what had been done to them, that the chronic skin conditions, the psychological problems, the recurring health issues they'd been dealing with for decades, were connected to the experiments they'd undergone in prison, men who'd been told by researchers that no harm would come to them, men who signed forms that said nothing about the chemicals being used. Not a single one of the defendants was held accountable. Not Cligman. Not the University of Pennsylvania. Not Dow Chemical. Not Johnson and Johnson. Not the city of Philadelphia. 300 men came forward and said, you did this to us. And the legal

system said, you're too late. The door is closed. Now think about why they were too late. These were men who, in many cases, didn't have high school educations. Men who had served time and which meant they faced enormous barriers to employment, housing, and medical care after their release. Men who lived in communities where access to legal services was limited and were trusting institutions, any institutions, had been beaten out of them by experience. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. And they were expected to have assembled a complex civil lawsuit,

connecting their health problems to specific experiments, identified the responsible parties and filed within the statute of limitations, all while dealing with the physical and psychological damage those very experiments had caused. The system that used them also made it nearly impossible for them to seek justice. That's not an accident. That's how power works. And the apologies, when they finally came, felt hollow to many of the survivors. Because by the time those apologies arrived, most of the men who'd been experimented on

were elderly or dead. The harm had been done decades ago. Lives had already been broken. In 2003, a group of former inmates calling themselves the Homesburg survivors gathered outside the Philadelphia College of Physicians. They held handmade signs and chanted into a megaphone. Inside the building, Albert Kligman was receiving a lifetime achievement award. For the man who'd infected them with diseases,

burned their skin with chemicals, ripped out their fingernails, and injected them with asbestos, the man who'd called them acres of skin. He was being honored, and they were standing outside in the cold, still carrying the scars he'd given them. Cligman never apologized, not once, not publicly, not privately, not in any form that's been documented. In the late 1990s, after Hornblum's book came out, Cligman told the Baltimore son that his use of paid prisoners as research subjects

was in keeping with standard protocol at the time. He said no one had suffered any long-term effects. He said all they'd done was offer the inmates' money for a little piece of their skin. In 2006, when a New York Times reporter asked him about the controversy, Kligman was even more defiant. He said shutting down the prison experiments was a big mistake. He said he was on the Medical Ethics Committee at Pan, and he still didn't see anything wrong with what they'd been doing.

He died on February 22nd, 2010, at the age of 93, from a heart attack. He was survived by his third wife. He had been a member of the University of Pennsylvania's faculty for more than 50 years, and at the time of his death, he was still celebrated in many corners of the dermatological world as a giant in the field. It should also be noted that beyond the ethical controversy, Cligman's actual scientific credibility was called into question during his career. The Food and Drug Administration found discrepancies in the data underlying some of his experiments

and barred him from conducting research for a period. That's the FDA telling a researcher that his data can't be trusted. And yet, the awards kept coming. The accolades kept piling up. The institutions that should have been scrutinizing his work were too invested in the products and profits it generated to ask hard questions. That's one of the things that makes this story so infuriating. It's not just that the experiments happened, it's that the entire system, from the university

to the corporations, to the regulatory agencies, to the courts, worked together, whether intentionally or through willful neglect, to ensure that no one was ever held responsible. Every institution that could have intervened at some point along the way chose not to, and the men who paid the price had no recourse. It would take more than a decade after Cligman's death for the institutions that had enabled and profited from his experiments to begin issuing apologies. In 2021, the Dean of Penn Medicine, J. Larry Jameson, issued a formal apology for the experiments. He called Cligman's work disrespectful.

The university renamed the annual Cligman Lecture and redirected research funds that had been held in Cligman's name toward dermatology residents, interested in working on skin of color and other fellowships. It was something. But for the survivors and their families, it felt like, too little, far too late. In 2022, the city of Philadelphia issued its own apology. Then Mayor Jim Kenny acknowledged that the experiments had created lasting distrust in communities of color, and pledged to continue working to address past wrongs. In 2023, the College of Physicians of

Philadelphia, the same institution that had given Cligman his Lifetime Achievement Award 20 years earlier, issued an apology as well. But apologies, however sincere, don't pay medical bills. They don't reverse decades of chronic illness. They don't give back the years lost to psychiatric hospitals and broken families. And they don't change the fundamental reality that the men of Holmesburg were used, exploited, and then discarded by some of the most powerful institutions in the country. As of now, no reparations have been paid. The survivors and their descendants have continued to push for financial compensation from the University of Pennsylvania and the pharmaceutical companies that profited from the experiments. At a 2023 panel at St. Joseph's

University, Survivors Irvin Moore, Herbert Rice, and Levone Miller sat alongside Adrian Jones-Aulston, the daughter of Leotis Jones, and laid out their demands. Before sharing his testimony, Irvin Moore looked at the audience and said five words. He said them slowly, deliberately, as if he needed people to understand that what he was about to tell them was not a story, or an exaggeration or a distortion. He said, this is the truth. Moore was ultimately incarcerated for more than 50 years. He first learned about the experiments and the money they offered

when he arrived at Holmesburg in 1969. He was young. He was poor. He was locked up. And someone in a white coat told him he could earn a little money by participating in a study. He didn't know what dioxin was. He didn't know what radioactive isotopes were. He didn't know that the pills he swallowed had been designed by the CIA to break people's minds.

He just knew that a $1.50 was more than $15, and that the men in the white coats told him it was safe. Herbert Rice served about three years for burglary. After he got out, he earned his GED, built a 30-year career with the Philadelphia Recreation Department, and worked his way up to a supervisory position. But he also did three stints in psychiatric hospitals. He watched his marriage disintegrate. He lost contact with his children for years. And he traced all of it back to those experiments.

To whatever it was they gave him inside Holmesburg that made him hallucinate and left him with night terrors that lasted for decades. When Rice tried to get help in the 1990s, his doctors didn't believe him. They thought the experiments were a delusion. That's how invisible these men were. That's how thoroughly the institutions that hurt them had managed to bury the truth. There's a lesson in the story of Holmesburg that goes beyond the specific experiments, beyond Cligman, beyond even the pharmaceutical companies, and the government agencies that funded the work.

It's a lesson about what happens when a society decides that certain people don't count, that their pain doesn't register, that their bodies are raw material to be used and discarded, and Holmesburg wasn't alone. It was part of a larger pattern, a nationwide system of exploitation that treats. treated incarcerated people as disposable subjects for medical experimentation. During the same decades that Kligman was operating at Holmesburg, researchers in Oregon and Washington were irradiating the testicles of healthy prisoners and taking repeated biopsies of the damaged tissue.

In Alabama, the Tuskegee Siphilis study was letting black men die of untreated syphilis so doctors could study the progression of the disease. In Kentucky, mental patients were being dosed with LSD for 160,000. 74 consecutive days. In New York and San Francisco, the CIA was running safe houses where unsuspecting civilians were drugged and observed through one-way glass. The entire country had become a laboratory, and the test subjects were always the same people.

The poor. The imprisoned. The marginalized. The forgotten thread in all of these cases wasn't just bad science. It was dehumanization. The researchers involved had convinced themselves. or been trained to believe that the people they were experimenting on were somehow less than fully human.

Cligman didn't see inmates. He saw acres of skin. The Tuskegee researchers didn't see patients. They saw data points. The CIA didn't see citizens. They saw expendable assets. When you strip people of their humanity, there are no limits to what you can justify doing to them.

History has shown us that over and over again, and we keep acting surprised. when it happens. The men of Holmesburg weren't volunteers in any meaningful sense of the word. You can't truly volunteer when you're locked in a cage, earning 15 cents a day with no education, no legal representation, and no understanding of what's being done to you. Consent that's purchased from desperate people under conditions of total powerlessness isn't consent. It's coercion dressed up in paperwork, and the system that allowed it wasn't an accident. It was built by people who knew exactly what they were doing. Kligman knew, the University of Pennsylvania knew, Dow Chemical knew, Johnson & Johnson knew, the United States Army knew, the CIA knew. They all made

conscious decisions to use human beings as test subjects because those human beings were locked away where nobody could see them, and because the people in power had decided that their suffering was an acceptable cost of doing business. The Nuremberg Code, which was drafted in 1947 in response to the horrific medical experiments conducted by Nazi doctors during the Holocaust, established clear principles for ethical human experimentation. The very first principle states that the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. The code was written to prevent exactly what happened at Holmesburg, and it was ignored completely and systematically for more than two decades by American doctors,

American corporations, and the American government. Senator Ted Kennedy, who held congressional hearings on prison experimentation in the 1970s, put it bluntly. He said that despite the Nuremberg Code and all the ethical principles that had been laid out since the end of World War II, it was always the poorest and most powerless members of society who bore the brunt of unethical biomedical research. Kligman's work at Holmesburg, Kennedy said, had become a textbook example. Today, Holmesburg prison still stands.

It's been closed since 1995, though parts of the campus have been used sporadically for prisoner overflow as recently as 2013. The building is decaying. The cell blocks are empty. The walls are crumbling. Nature is slowly reclaiming the grounds. But the damage it caused isn't decaying. It's alive.

It's carried in the bodies and memories of the men who survived, and in the families they've tried to hold together in the years since. It's carried in the distrust that communities. communities of color feel toward medical institutions, a distrust that didn't come from nowhere, that wasn't born of paranoia or ignorance, but that grew directly from experiences like Holmesburg and Tuskegee, and all the other times the people in power decided that black bodies were expendable. Alan Hornblum, the author who brought this story to light, has been asked whether he thinks something like Holmesburg could happen again. He said he's skeptical

that the public can prevent future ethical violations behind prison walls, given how prisons operate in this country. The journalist Harriet Washington, who has written extensively about medical racism, shares that skepticism. And honestly, it's hard to argue with them, because the fundamental conditions that made Holmesburg possible, mass incarceration, racial inequality, the profit motive in medical research, the dehumanization of people behind bars, none of those things have gone away. They've evolved. They've taken new forms. But they're still here. The United States still incarcerates more people per capita than any other nation on earth. The prison population is still disproportionately black and brown. The pharmaceutical

industry still needs human test subjects, and the people inside those prisons are still among the most vulnerable, most desperate, and least visible members of our society. The regulations we have today are stronger than they were in Cligman's era, but regulations are only as good as the institutions enforcing them. And as Holmesburg showed us, institutions can be corrupted. Oversight can be evaded. Records can be destroyed. And the people who suffer most are always the ones with the least power to fight back.

There's also the matter of trust, and this is something that doesn't get talked about enough. What happened at Holmesburg and Tuskegee and all the other sites, where marginalized communities were used as test subjects didn't just damage the bodies of the people involved. It damaged the relationship between those communities and the medical system itself. When black Americans express skepticism about vaccines or clinical trials or the health care system in general, they aren't being irrational. They're drawing on a lived history that includes being experimented on without their knowledge or consent by the very institutions that were supposed to protect them.

You can't spend decades using people as guinea pigs and then acts surprised when their grandchildren don't trust you. The men of Holmesburg didn't choose to be test subjects. They chose to survive. And the institutions that used them, from the Ivy League University to the Fortune 500 corporations, to the agencies of the federal government, they chose profit over principle every single time. Albert Kligman saw those men and saw acres of skin, a resource to be harvested, a field to be plowed. The men saw themselves. They saw each other.

And decades later, the ones who are still alive are still fighting to make sure the rest of us see them too. This has been the story of the Holmesburg Prison Experiments, a story that deserves to be told and retold and never forgotten. Because the moment we forget what happened inside those walls is the moment we make it possible for it to happen again. And I want to close with one more thought, something that stuck with me throughout the research for this episode. When Alan Hornblum was writing his book, he sat down with dozens of former inmates who'd been through the experiments. He listened to their stories, he recorded their words. And one of the things that struck him, over and over again, was how long these men had carried their experiences in silence. Not because they didn't want to talk, but because nobody wanted to listen.

For decades, these men walked through the world with scars on their backs and chemicals in their blood and nightmares in their heads. and the society that had put them through all of it simply looked away. That's the thing about prison. When you lock someone behind a wall, you're not just taking away their freedom. You're taking away their visibility, their voice, their standing as a human being who matters. And once you've done that, once you've made someone invisible, you can do almost anything to them.

Because if nobody can see them, nobody can help them. And if nobody can help them, nobody has to answer for what's been done. The men of Holmesburg were made invisible, and it took half a century for the world to finally see them. Let's not look away again.