It’s shameful that it took decades for UC San Francisco to acknowledge and publicly apologize for faculty members who conducted unethical experiments on hundreds of men incarcerated at a medical facility in Northern California. Only now has the institution begun reckoning with its dark history of medical experimentation on inmates.
A university investigation, started in 2022, found that two faculty members violated medical research ethics when they conducted invasive dermatological experiments on 2,600 men incarcerated at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville during the 1960s and 1970s.
UCSF issued a public apology last month for the harms it caused the men after reviewing the findings of an investigation conducted by the Program for Historical Reconciliation, which the university created to examine claims of ethical wrongdoing in the past. It was the group’s first investigation, which focused on experiments conducted by Dr. Howard Maibach, a current faculty member, and Dr. William Epstein, a former dermatology chair who died in 2006.
