Science Vs - Science's Rotten Underbelly

Episode Date: March 22, 2019

During a golden age for scientific progress, a group of scientists were given free rein to do whatever they wanted to their human lab rats. We got new drugs, and learnt exciting new things. But some researchers took it too far... And what seemed like a scientific fantasy turned into one of the largest American science scandals. Check out the full transcript here: http://bit.ly/2MLBX6u Selected references: The 1976 report from the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research Allen Hornblum’s book Acres of Skin (1998)2007 report from the Institute of Medicine Committee on Ethical Considerations for Research The Experimental Scurvy in Man 1969 study  Credits: This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman with help from Rose Rimler, Meryl Horn and Michelle Dang. Our senior producer is Kaitlyn Sawrey. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell and Caitlin Kenney. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Michelle Dang. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode including Professor Karen Lebacqz, Michael Yesley. Also thanks to Sruthi Pinnamaneni, the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Today, a very different kind of episode. We're taking you back to a time where a group of scientists had free reign to do whatever they wanted to their human guinea pigs. It was basically the wild, wild west of science. And out of this time, we got new medicine, made scientific progress. But things spiralled out of this time, we got new medicine, made scientific progress. But things spiralled out of control when researchers took it too far. We're starting our story with a man who stumbled into this world decades ago.

So let me get you some coffee and then we can... Great. His name is Sigmund Weitzman, or Sig. He's a jolly guy, loves to laugh. And as we sat down for coffee, Sig told me about growing up in Philadelphia in the 50s and 60s. His family was working class, no-one had been to college. But Sig had big dreams.

He'd always wanted to be a doctor. So I'd finished college and I was going to start medical school. First, though, he needed a summer job. And I thought, well, it would be interesting to do something that might have some relationship with what I was going to do in the future. And I thought, well, maybe there's some research or medical research or any kind of research. And it's this research that would plunge him into the centre

of what would become a national scandal. I didn't know. I was too stupid, to be honest, to think anything more about it. Before any of that, though, Sig is just an eager college grad looking for that summer gig. So he opens up the phone book. Yeah, so I thought, well, I'll look up research laboratories in the yellow pages. This is how naive I was.

He's going alphabetically, and once he gets to the letter C, he sees a listing in small print. Clover Laboratories, it was only a phone number and an address. Didn't have anything except a listing. Clover Laboratories. Sounded medicine-y to Sig. So he dials the number, a man picks up, and Sig tells him, I've just finished college, I'm going to medical school, and I'm looking for a job.

He said, you're exactly what we need for this summer. Why don't you come to this address tomorrow morning and I'll meet with you and you can decide if you'd like to do this, this job. The next day, Sid gets into his car and heads to the address he was given. He's driving through a pretty residential part of Philly. There's yards, brick houses. And all of a sudden I see these huge, big granite buildings. Scary. Scary-looking Victorian-type buildings.

I looked at the address where I was driving. I said, my God, it's a jail. Prisons, the big house, whatever you want to call them. And did you know you were going to be working in a jail? I had no idea. I thought I was going to be working in a laboratory. You know, benches, pouring chemicals and spinning centrifuges. And that was the thing.

I was completely flummoxed. What did I get myself into? What did he get himself into? Well, Sig was about to enter a world where scientists were experimenting on prisoners. And this wasn't just some bad apples, a few rotten scientists. No. What felt like a weird summer job was actually part of an industry where the US government and big pharma were testing new drugs in prisons. So on today's show, how did this happen? And how did people like Sig get sucked in? That's coming up after the break.

Welcome back. We've just met Sigmund Weizmann, who in the 1960s had just finished college and landed himself a lab job. He hoped he was on his way to a shiny, state-of-the-art medical facility. But it turned out the lab was in a prison, and the lab rats were prisoners. On his first day at work, Sig's new boss gives him the lay of the land. He told me they were doing research on pharmaceuticals and commercial cosmetic products, things like toothpaste, shampoo, skin creams, deodorants.

And so tell me, what was the first experiment that you were involved in? Being the youngest guy, I was the person who got asked to do the most unpleasant tasks. So the first thing, I remember this very distinctly, was the sweat box. The sweat box. This was a small room where the temperature was 100 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity was at 90%. So one of the products they were testing was an antiperspirant. Sig's job was to find out how well the antiperspirant worked. And here's what that meant.

Prisoners would come in. OK, so under one arm, I spread a placebo and under the other arm, I had spread the antiperspirant. Then I took the gauze pads on a forceps and very carefully placed them under each arm. Sig would then take the men, gauze pads in their armpits, into that stinking hot sweat box for about an hour. And after that, he needed to remove the pads. When I went in to retrieve the pads and take them out of there, it was quite unpleasant.

The gauze pads would be dripping with sweat and Sig would carefully weigh the wet pads. The lighter they were, the less sweat, the better the antiperspirant. So this was gross for Sig. But what about the prisoners? They were the ones being put into this sweltering room. Did Sig have any qualms at this point? Were you like, oh, should we be doing this? Not at all. It seemed to me perfectly harmless and nobody seemed to be upset by it and I couldn't see anything wrong with it. And to Sig, the prisoners seemed happy enough to do these experiments because they were getting paid. Not much, sometimes a couple of dollars for each test, but it was more than they could make doing other jobs at the prison. The money would go into what's called their commissary accounts and the prisoners could use it for better food or cigarettes.

I talked to them a lot about why they were doing what they did, and it was always for the money in their commissary account. And they were content to do what they thought were things of low risk. See, both I and the prisoners really believed that there was very little risk to what they were doing. So Sig wasn't really questioning these experiments. And in some cases, he really was doing useful science. Like there were these tests to find a treatment for athlete's foot, which was infecting a lot of soldiers in the Vietnam War at the time. And so some prisoners who had athlete's foot would come to the lab,

take off their boots and present their feet to Sig. Oh, my God, that was horrible. It was scaly and oozing and red, and I had to spread apart their toes and then carefully pipette, which is like a big eyedropper. I had to pipette a couple of drops of this thick yellow liquid between each of their toes. What was in the liquid? Something that would kill athlete's foot. And I only did it on one foot, and the other foot was allowed to...

Fester? Well, it was left alone. Let's just put it that way. And what were the prisoners saying? Was it uncomfortable for them? They didn't seem to mind the liquid and they made fun of me as I spread their toes apart. That was the other thing. Good job you have there. And some other choice comments. Sig kind of got used to this weird day-to-day,

but as the summer went on, a few things happened that made Sig start to question what was going on. The first thing was when a prisoner had a bad reaction to one of the products that he was testing. And Sig remembers this day very well. He was minding his own business in the lab when this guy stormed in. And he was a massive guy, 240 pounds, a heavyweight champion. And before Sig knew it, the guy... Picks me up off the ground as if I were a toy. I'm terrified because he's furious.

And holding me in the air, he said he's going to throw me through the wall and kill me. The prisoner is so angry. And then he tells Sig why. My hair's falling out. And I looked and his hair was falling out in clumps. And it was due to the stuff I was putting in his hair. He was very upset about it. This prisoner had a beautiful, thick head of hair. That was until he enrolled himself into an experiment for hair cream. And Sig

was stunned. It seemed safe. The idea that someone's hair would fall out never, never entered my mind. And so that shocked me. No one else seemed shocked, though. Everyone around Sig just kind of shrugged it off. But Sig was then seeing other things that gave him pause. Like, there were these experiments known as patch tests,

and to test different products, Sig would have prisoners take off their shirts and then he'd put creams or liquids on their backs. He'd then stick a patch over the top of it, which he'd take off a few days later. I recall pipetting liquids from dark bottles and then apply it to the back of one of the volunteers. It was almost like an assembly line.

It was an enormous operation. How much did you tell the prisoners about what was going on? You told them the procedure. So we're going to put this on your back and see if there's a reaction to it. tell the prisoners about what was going on. You told them the procedure. So we're going to put this on your back and see if there's a reaction to it. But you didn't tell them what the this is, what you're actually putting on their skin. You didn't know what it was.

You didn't know what it was. I did not know what it was. Every now and then, Sig would pull off the patches and the skin underneath would be in bad shape. Some people got pretty bad reactions on their skin. What sort of things? Oh, blisters, redness, sometimes infections, and sometimes scarring. And so when you saw the scars, did you have pause

of what was going on? I think coming from my background, which was sort of working class, lower middle class background, we revered professors and academics and respected them, and that was the way I was brought up. Still, Sig says at one point he did ask his supervisor, should we be worried about these bad reactions? He said, oh, it very rarely happens. It's nothing to worry about.

And Dr. Kligman says it's okay. Dr. Kligman says it's okay. That was Dr. Albert Kligman, a professor of dermatology at the very prestigious University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Kligman was the brains behind this operation in Philly's prisons, and he was a hero in American dermatology. Dr. Kligman died in 2010, so we couldn't interview him for this story. Did you meet him? Never. Did you hear about him? How was he kind of spoken of? He was very famous and revered as a great, a world-class dermatologist, one of the leaders in his field.

Everyone respected his opinion and thought he was just the best thing ever. And I was impressed with that. And so it may have contributed to swaying me to hang in there. And so Sig hung in there, trusting his superiors, trusting Dr Kligman week in, week out, testing all kinds of things. And Sig says that in many ways, prisons were the ideal place for human experiments. You could pay prisoners a lot less than other research subjects, so it was cheaper to run the studies.

But also, at a prison, you had the perfect environment to run an experiment. Think about it. In the real world, people live completely different lives, so comparing them for research is really tough. In prison, everyone basically does the same thing every day. You can tell them where to show up, when to show up. You can control what they eat if you're interested in their diet. I mean, you really have control over their everyday lives. And the scientists at Sig's lab took full advantage of this.

And what Sig didn't know was that there were actually hundreds of experiments taking place in prisons all over the country, with scores of other Sigs carefully pipetting liquids onto prisoners' backs. Sig continued on that summer, wrapping up his work and heading off to medical school as he planned in the fall. And it wasn't until years later that he would learn the scale of what he was a part of and that the experiments he was doing were far worse than he ever imagined.

Coming up after the break. Welcome back. We just found out that US scientists were routinely doing experiments on prisoners in the 1960s. And this was happening in prisons all across America, from Georgia to Michigan to California. And after talking to Sigmund about his unusual summer job, we had to find out why. Like, how did testing on prisoners become the new normal? We soon found out that this had been building for a while,

and by the 1950s, scientists had been using US prisoners in experiments actually pretty regularly. But something changed in the early 1960s that gave a real push to this business of using prisoners as human guinea pigs. And it was actually something that was supposed to make us all safer. Here's what happened.

In the 1950s and early 60s, pregnant women around the world were being given this drug to help them with morning sickness. It was called thalidomide. There was a problem, though. It turned out that the drug caused serious deformities in babies and people were furious that this had been allowed to happen. The US government realised they had to do something. John F. Kennedy was the president at the time. Every doctor, every hospital, every nurse has been notified. Every woman in this country must be aware that it's most important that they do not take this drug.

The government wanted to make sure this didn't happen again. So in 1962, new rules were brought in to make drugs safer. And one of the big changes was that drug companies now had to test a drug in several phases before it could be sold. In the first phase, new drugs would be tested in healthy people, those who weren't sick, to see if there were any nasty side effects. And before long... Thousands of inmates across the country were incorporated in experiments. So this was huge.

This was an industry. This was an industry. Prisoners were the backbone of medical research. This is Alan Hornblum. He's talked to dozens of prisoners who were involved in experiments at this time. And he wrote a book about them called Acres of Skin. And Alan says that when researchers all of a sudden needed a lot of human test subjects, prisoners felt like an obvious choice. After all, if you need bodies... You're not going to use significant people in the national or state legislature.

You don't go to the string section of the New York Philharmonic. You don't go to the faculty of Columbia University. You go where there are people on the shelf. You go where there are people on the shelf, you go to prisons. By the early 1970s, the vast majority of all phase one drug testing was being done on prisoners. Records show that the major pharmaceutical companies at the time were doing this. Bristol Myers, Johnson & Johnson, and Eli Lilly. Even the FDA, NIH and Centres for Disease Control were testing vaccines and antibiotics on prisoners.

Like some of the early experiments on the flu vaccine, they were done in prisons. Some of these studies were published in prestigious academic journals and some were even reported in newspapers like the Boston Globe or Philadelphia Inquirer. And once in a while, something may make news. But if it did, it was a one-day news story. And in many cases, it was glowing.

People thought it was fairly beneficial and innocuous. And of course, companies weren't just using prisoners to find life-saving medicines. They were hiring guys like Sig to test the stuff you get at the drugstore, like antiperspirants and skin creams. And this arrangement worked for lots of people. Science was marching forward. We were getting safer drugs. And at the time, no one seemed too worried about what this was doing to the prisoners.

But some of the prisoners that Alan spoke to, well, they said they got permanently injured and regretted being a part of these experiments. Looking back, former prisoner Alfon Skorsky says he felt abused by what was happening. I mean, these were doctors that were supposed to be helping me. Instead of helping me, they hurt me. And why did they hurt me?

For personal gain is what it boiled down to. For their personal gain, I got hurt. This is from an interview that Alan did with Alphonse. And Alphonse said that he got a really nasty infection from one of these experiments that ended up creating a large scar across his leg, which stayed with him for the rest of his life. It's ugly. My children, when they were growing up, I couldn't go out onto the beach with them. I didn't want to draw attention to myself and to

my children. But as the 1960s are rolling into the 70s, people finally start noticing how messed up some of these experiments are. It came out that there was a study on baby shampoo for Johnson & Johnson, which involved dropping shampoo into the eyes of prisoners for hours. And there were news articles with stories of prisoners being hospitalised with burns. The New York Times reported on one particularly dodgy vaccine experiment where a prisoner even died. Meanwhile, the public is getting more and more suspicious of scientists

as news was breaking about a different shady study, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. That was where hundreds of black men who had syphilis were left untreated. Here's Alan again. It really gives a collective chill to all sorts of people. And little by little, you start to see pressure being put on different institutions. People really start to wake up. As people are waking up, though, some of the scientists involved in this work seemed unapologetic. In one article, a researcher was quoted as saying,

criminals in our penitentiaries are fine experimental material and much cheaper than chimpanzees. Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies argued that they needed prisoners to advance science and that killing the program would make it harder to test new drugs and ultimately cure diseases. And there were doctors at the time who very much argued against the government stopping the experiments. They were arguing this is going to nail science in the bud. We won't be able to move forward. We won't be able to move forward. We won't be able to do our research if we don't have test subjects. So working out what to do with these experiments at the time actually wasn't easy.

So Congress sets up a commission to sort out whether this research should be stopped or not. They got together a group of researchers and lawyers. And one of those people tasked with deciding what to do here was a young lawyer called Patricia King. And when Patricia first heard about these experiments happening to prisoners, she said it actually wasn't a shock. I wasn't surprised. I wouldn't be surprised that there are many things when it comes to how prisoners are treated. Jails are not good places. What was a surprise for Patricia, though, was how some of the prisoners felt about the experiments.

The commissioners talked to a lot of prisoners who joined the research and while a few, like Alphonse, were upset because they got hurt, many didn't feel that way at all. Patricia remembers one inmate who was downright pissed at the commissioners for butting in. He focused his attention on me and basically he said, I wish you damn ACLU-type liberals would stay out of here and leave us alone.

We don't want you here. We know what we are doing and, you know, we don't need you to come in here and tell us how to run things. The commissioners went on to speak to 80 prisoners about whether research should be stopped and reported that they, quote, unanimously said no, end quote. These prisoners, they wanted the research to go on, and part of this was the money that they were paid for the experiments. But interviews with prisoners from the time found that taking part in these studies also had other perks, like they were treated better in the experiments than in the rest of the jail, and sometimes they got to sleep in the lab, which

one prisoner said was better than the cells because you weren't afraid that someone would, quote, bust you in the head, end quote. Some commissioners were pretty convinced by this and thought maybe the research should go on. And some people at the National Commission had no problem with that. But Patricia and some other commissioners were like, wait, let's think for a minute here. You have people in a crap situation

who seem to be doing these experiments to make their situation slightly less crap. Or in other words... My problem was you have a captive population and you're taking advantage of their powerlessness. Taking advantage of their powerlessness. The commission also looked into whether black prisoners were more likely to be a part of these experiments.

And they didn't find evidence for that. In fact, there tended to be more white prisoners involved in these studies. So after much debate and going round in circles for months on what was the right thing to do here, the Commission made up its mind. In 1976, they published their report, ultimately creating new rules around prisoner experiments. Now, those rules didn't include an all-out ban on all experiments done in prisons, but

they put a ton of restrictions in place, making it all but impossible for a lot of the prisoner research to go on. And ultimately, the industry of prisoner experiments shut down. Over the next few decades, more and more details would come out about exactly what went on in some of these prisoner experiments. In several cases, scientists were actually infecting prisoners with diseases, diseases like cholera, malaria and hepatitis. In one study, researchers took four healthy men from Iowa State Penitentiary

and stopped them from eating vitamin C so that they got scurvy. And sure, scurvy may sound like some ye olde sailor disease, but it's actually gruesome. By the end of the experiment, the men's gums were bleeding. We talked to one scientist who thought this experiment was outrageous. That's terrible. They know that from the English sailors in the 1700s what happens. They die. Why would they do that? Like why? I don't understand it. Yeah. This is Sigmund Weizmann again, our scientist from the start of the show.

And we're coming back to him to find out, did he have any idea of how bad this all was? Well, Sig told me that he had totally missed that this was a nationwide controversy back in the 1970s. He was graduating from medical school and starting his career as a cancer researcher, not really reading the news. But in 1981, there was a headline in the newspaper that Sigman did catch, and it made him rethink what he was doing that summer. The article said that Dow Chemical

Company had been doing tests on prisoners in Philly while Sigmund worked there. They were testing a chemical found in Agent Orange, which was used in chemical warfare during the Vietnam War. What they were testing was dioxin. The EPA calls it extremely toxic. It can disfigure your skin and cause cancer. And there's evidence that Dow Chemical Company knew it was dangerous at the time. Here's Sig. And I read the article and I got, I remember how angry I got. It was, I was just infuriated. I still can't get over it. Here, all these years later, I get so upset when I think he's just giving people poison without telling them and looking and seeing what happens. How can you do that?

I mean it. How can you do that? But when Sig thought about it, he realized that he might have been the one doing it. Sig was there when those dioxin tests were going on, and he's pretty sure that some of those dark little bottles were full of dioxin. I didn't have any knowledge of it it and I wasn't aware of it, but we were putting poison on people's backs.

And at the time I thought it was the most interesting thing. It's peculiar how that happens. Even after all this came out, there were basically no consequences for any of the people or companies involved. Very few prisoners were compensated for getting hurt. We reached out to several pharmaceutical companies about these experiments. Most didn't get back to us. But Johnson & Johnson told us, well, back then, this was widely accepted, and it was done by prominent researchers. As for Sig, he's retired from medicine now. But ever since he read that article, he thinks about these questions of how you can keep people safe when you're doing research.

In fact, now Sig reviews studies to help make sure that nothing like these prisoner experiments can happen again. You try to hope that the benefits outweigh the risks. That's what you're trying to do when you evaluate these things. I still get very upset about it when I think about it. It's not something you forget. But this is something that history, in many ways, has forgotten. Even though prisoners were the backbone of scientific research for more than a decade, it's not something that many of us learn about in Biology 101. We at Science Versus have even used research that was done on prisoners, and we never realised

that this was part of an industry. And what struck us was how easy it was for scientists to get caught up in this, to think it was a good idea to run all kinds of experiments on prisoners, and how easily everyone justified it. After all, we were creating new and safer drugs, advancing scientific knowledge. Why rock the boat? That's Science Versus. This episode had 109 citations. If you want to find them, head to our website.

And if you want to see behind-the-scenes photos of us making Science Versus and just being nerds, head to our new Instagram account. We're at science underscore BS. That's science underscore BS on Instagram. See you there. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Rose Rimler, Meryl Horne and Michelle Dang. Our senior producer is Caitlin Sorey.

We're edited by Blythe Terrell and Caitlin Kenny. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Michelle Dang. Mix and sound design by Peter Leonard. Music by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the researchers that we got in touch with for this episode, including Professor Karen Labax and Michael Yeasley. An extra thanks to Shruti Pinamaneni, the Zuckerman family and Joseph Lavelle-Wilson. Next week, fasting. Could not eating be

good for you? And can you stick to it? 80% of what you're burning now is fat. Wow. So it's a big increase. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.