8 Shockingly Unethical Experiments That Actually Happened

3. The Holmesburg Program

The history of unethical experimentation is shot through with experiments being carried out on the 'underclasses' of society: black people, women, prisoners, orphans, and the mentally ill. The Holmesburg Program was one such experiment, carried out on the inmates of Holmesburg prison.

For a period of 20 years, the prisoners were used to test all sorts of products such as toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, skin creams, detergents, liquid diets, eye drops, foot powders, and hair dye. These seem harmless, but the test were often accompanied by biopsies and painful procedures. In 1967, the U.S. Army paid Kligman to apply skin-blistering chemicals to the faces and backs of inmates at Holmesburg, in Kligman's words, "to learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process."

Things got darker still when the inmates were used as guinea pigs to test the latest mind-altering drugs the Vietnam war, when they were dosed with dioxin, a highly toxic and carcinogenic compound found in Agent Orange,

The prisoners developed severe skin lesions which were left untreated for seven months, and many went on to develop long term health problems such as lupus and psychological damage.