We call on President Amy Gutmann to formally and publicly apologize for Penn’s complicity in the harmful medical experimentation conducted by Penn Professor Albert Kligman upon the incarcerated people of Holmesburg Prison between 1951-1974. Penn must apologize directly to the victims and their families for this harm. It is shameful that Penn President Amy Gutmann publishes books on bioethics and healthcare, while this university continues to profit from unethical medical research and the prison industrial complex.

The Kligman experiments are part of a long history of anti-Blackness in medicine and anthropology perpetuated by the university since its founding in 1887. This includes the Penn Museum’s Samuel George Morton cranial collection of formerly enslaved people and Black Philadelphians of the 19th century; and the Museum’s illegal and unethical treatment and holding of human remains of the MOVE family after the bombing of the Africa family’s residence May 13, 1985. We are confronted with the pervasive legacy and unacknowledged remnants of 19th and 20th-century racial science and eugenics. Penn must make reparations for the unethical treatment, dispossession, and abuse of Black people and families by medical and university researchers.

Penn must redress this harm by financially compensating victims and their families. This reparations process needs to be conducted with input from the families, heeding the call of Adrianne D. Jones-Alston to address the medical ailments that resulted from the tests upon the formerly imprisoned people. One recent precedent for reparations is the legislation passed by the Chicago City Council in 2015 for victims of police violence per the demands made by the Chicago Justice Torture Memorials.

• Between 1951-1974 Penn dermatologist Dr. Albert Kligman ran skin experiments on thousands of incarcerated men at Holmesburg Prison, a Philadelphia county jail. The atrocities are detailed in the book Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison, by Allen Hornblum.

• Commercial medical products were produced off the backs, faces, and bodies of incarcerated people used as lab rats. Kligman patented the acne & anti-aging creams Retin-A and Renova and made tens of millions of dollars in royalties, which he donated to Penn’s dermatology department. (By 1992 he had donated $15 million.) Johnson & Johnson and the pharmaceutical industry made hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of Retin-A.

• Former prisoners developed a lifetime of gruesome side effects from these medical experiments, including scarring, burns, recurrent rashes, pustules, massive swelling of hands and feet, rectal and digestive problems, and mental illness. Some of these men are still alive, and their families live on.

We uphold the calls of over 300 former prisoners who sued the University, the City of Philadelphia, Dow Chemical Company, and Kligman’s Ivy Research Laboratories in their 2001 lawsuit for “allowing infectious diseases, radioactive isotopes, dioxin, and psychotropic drugs” to be tested on incarcerated Holmesburg people without their consent. We uphold the recent call of Dr. Jules Lipoff, a Penn Medicine dermatologist who has demanded that the university cut ties with Kligman.

The university must provide a full and transparent account of the profits made from the medical research done at Holmesburg and associated with Kligman and his team, including royalties from the Retin-A and Renova patents and other products, and any moneys donated to UPenn by the Kligman Estate.

In addition to the transparent disclosure, formal apology, and financial compensation to victims and their families, Penn must remove Albert Kligman’s name from any buildings, promotional materials and brochures, awards, grants, named lectureships, professorships, fellowships, or other symbolic honors in the School of Medicine and at the university. This includes removing the portrait of Kligman that still hangs outside the Dermatology laboratories in Penn Medicine

The Kligman Lectureship for residents in training should be removed and replaced with education about Kligman’s harmful legacy, the history of unethical medical experimentation, and the ongoing forms of structural racism in medicine. Current faculty and practitioners, medical residents in training, and dermatology students should be informed about this ongoing history in the required medical ethics courses. Discussion of Penn’s own moral transgressions, including the Kligman experiments, should be explicitly taught as part of Human Subjects Research Training and as case studies for Responsible Conduct of Research in Biomedical Graduate Studies and other relevant areas.

Penn Medicine claims to be a national leader in dozens of areas of medicine and the self-professed home of a “robust medical ethics department, one of the largest and deepest in the country.” We call on Penn Medicine to make good on your Hippocratic Oath. Uphold the Nuremberg Code. Embrace this opportunity to make things right.

Reparations thus includes:

1. Formal apology from Penn’s President to victims and surviving families

2. Financial compensation to those harmed in consultation with affected communities

3. Full disclosure of profits made from Penn’s experiments

4. Removing Kligman’s name from all University entities

5. Requiring Med School ethics education on Kligman’s experiments

Penn must publicly acknowledge the names of the people whose lives they exploited in this instance and others in the name of “scientific research.” It’s time to stop obfuscating and instead confront the racism built into the very fabric of scientific disciplines and institutions of higher learning. As renowned abolitionist Angela Davis has written, “throughout the history of the U.S. prison system, prisoners have always constituted a potential source of profit”; “the prison [is] a major link between universities and corporations.”