Taken aback by the outlandish proposition, William Harper wasn’t sure he had heard the physician’s offer correctly. His boss, the acclaimed dermatologist and University of Pennsylvania professor Dr. Albert M. Kligman, had just offered to pay him $150 for permission to transplant a piece of Harper’s arm to his face, and a piece of his face to his arm. The bizarre request came with no reason or explanation. But everything in the jail at that time—especially the medical portion—was pretty strange. Half of those behind bars sported bandages and medical tape—not from prison gang wars or exercise-yard brawls, but from participation in university-orchestrated clinical trials. Everyone—sentenced or unsentenced—seemed to be a test subject.
Awaiting trial in Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison in the 1960s and desperate for money like everyone else in the jail, Hop (as he was known to his friends) had been hired to work in Kligman’s research program. He recruited inmates as test subjects, distributed medication to those in the trials, and made a few extra dollars occasionally volunteering as a human guinea pig himself. The extra dollar or two a day he received in exchange for getting an injection slathered with some unknown substance, or swallowing some foul-tasting milkshake concoction, kept him stocked with commissary items and helped him pay for a lawyer. Not all the experiments were pain-free and without consequences. But Kligman’s weird surgical notion—“having body parts moved around,” as Hop phrased it—was even more unusual than the normal craziness that transpired in Pennsylvania’s long-running prison testing program. Despite his reservations, Hop eventually agreed to the procedure. “The money,” he told me, “was too good to pass up,” so he underwent the skin transplantation. For the rest of his life, he had a fingernail-size piece of his bicep on his lower lip and a similar-size piece of his lip permanently planted on his arm.
Kligman, who later admitted he felt “like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time” during his initial visit to the prison, was quick to realize the jail’s research opportunities and economic potential. He would go on to single-handedly transform a portion of a big city’s criminal justice system into the nation’s largest clinical-trial factory, where, on any given day, hundreds of incarcerated men and women were being used as laboratory material for a bewildering array of medical experiments. In addition to testing soaps, hair dye, deodorant, toothpaste, shampoo, diet drinks, and other commercial products, prisoners were also exposed to dioxin, radioactive isotopes, and chemical warfare agents. There was also the presence of an industrial-scale Phase I drug testing program prized by Big Pharma. By the end of its nearly quarter-century run, in 1974, the Philadelphia prison system had become a one-stop shop for human experimentation. Anything—regardless of its ethicality or toxicity—that a private corporation (Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson, R.J. Reynolds) or government agency (US Army, CIA) wanted tested on humans could be realized through a simple rental contract for access to Dr. Kligman’s “acres of skin.”