A Bay Area dermatologist and university professor accused last year of using state prisoners in decades-old experiments that included pesticide injections has denied in a legal filing that his accusers had any evidence he caused harm.
Dr. Howard Maibach, now in his mid-90s, filed a court petition challenging a University of California San Francisco report accusing him of using “questionable research methods” in experiments in the ’60s and ’70s on at least 2,600 male inmates at the California Medical Facility, a state prison hospital in Vacaville. According to the petition, the report was conducted in response to claims by colleagues that his “racist” research while working for the school was conducted on Black prisoners.
The UC San Francisco report issued in December cited medical publications detailing Maibach’s “intravenous dosing of pesticides and herbicides,” along with applications of those chemicals to inmates’ skin, and the pressing of caged mosquitos against prisoners’ skin and observation of the “direct penetration of the proboscis,” the part of the insect that sucks human blood.
The university issued a news release about the report that referred to “harms that were done.” The release also said, “Such practices were common in the U.S. at the time and were increasingly being criticized both by experts and in the lay press.”
UC San Francisco did not respond to questions about Mailbach’s petition.
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