Recently disclosed court documents show that Johnson & Johnson paid for a study in which 10 imprisoned black men were injected with asbestos as part of the company’s early trials with talc, according to a new report in Bloomberg News.
Albert Kligman
While the news about the 50-year-old study itself isn’t new, having first been made public decades ago, J&J’s involvement in hundreds of experiments conducted by University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Albert Kligman over two decades at Pennsylvania’s Holmesburg Prison is new. and is likely to deal a serious blow to Big Pharma’s reputation.
The test regime, according to Bloomberg, was also funded by Dow Chemical and the federal government, and it sought to find out how asbestos, a known carcinogen in the 1950s, compared to talc.
J&J did not dispute Kligman’s hiring in the 1960s to run baby powder trials, Bloomberg found, but J&J officials said they regret the firm’s collaboration with a dermatologist.
Kim Montagnino
“We deeply regret the conditions under which these studies were conducted and they in no way reflect the values or methods we use today,” company spokeswoman Kim Montagnino said in a statement emailed to Bloomberg.
According to unsealed files, Kligman recruited 10 prisoners in 1971 to be injected with tremolite and chrysotile asbestos, as well as talc into their lower backs.
Meanwhile, J&J celebrated a victory in bankruptcy court late last month when a US judge ruled in favor of its controversial Chapter 11 filing to settle thousands of lawsuits alleging its talc-based products cause cancer.
J&J continues to claim that its talc products are safe, while 38,000 lawsuits allege that widely used baby powder and other commercial talc products contained asbestos and caused mesothelioma and ovarian cancer.
Meanwhile, Kligman died in 2010 and never admitted to any wrongdoing, according to Bloomberg. “My use of paid prisoners as research subjects in the 1950s and 1960s was in line with this country’s standard protocol for conducting scientific research at the time,” Kligman told the Baltimore Sun in 1998.