For the past eight years, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) has been dealing with lawsuits from women claiming that they developed ovarian cancer after using the company's talc products. Documents unsealed during these proceedings show that the company was involved in a study in which incarcerated men were paid to be injected with asbestos in order that the company could compare its effect on their skin with that of talc.
That study was just one out of hundreds of experiments that were conducted over the course of more than 20 years by Albert Kligman, MD, a dermatologist with the University of Pennsylvania, according to various reports in the media, including The New York Times.
The inmates were primarily Black men who were incarcerated at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The studies were funded by a variety of sponsors, including Dow Chemical and the US government. The studies were acknowledged several decades ago, but this is the first time that J&J's involvement has become known to the media after records of the studies were unsealed during the talc lawsuits.
Kligman died in 2010. He is quoted as sayingthat his experiments, conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, were in keeping with this nation's standard protocol for conducting scientific investigations at the time.
