Albert Kligman

Albert Montgomery Kligman (March 17, 1916 – February 9, 2010)[1] was an American dermatologist who co-invented Retin-A, the acne medication, with James Fulton in 1969.

[3] With financial support from Simon Greenberg, a major rabbi of the time, he attended Pennsylvania State University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1939.

[citation needed] The identification of the use of tretinoin along Dr. James E. Fulton and Dr. Gerd Plewig as a treatment for acne and wrinkles was perhaps their best-known contribution to dermatology.

Stemming from early testing of treatments for ringworm, his work there started with an effort to control athlete's foot at the invitation of prison officials.

Between 1951 and 1974, Kligman exposed approximately seventy-five prisoners at Holmesburg to high doses of dioxin,[failed verification] the contaminant responsible for Agent Orange's toxicity to humans.

Little effort was taken to assure the safety of the test subjects, some of whom were intentionally exposed to pathogens causing infections, including herpes, staphylococcus, and athlete's foot.

Though the suit was dismissed under the statute of limitations, the public reaction to the testing program contributed to the enactment of federal regulations restricting medical studies in prisons.

[1] Later commentators, including Senator Ted Kennedy, remarked how, in spite of the sets of ethical principles laid out in the 1947 Nuremberg Code and (much later) the Declaration of Helsinki, the poorer members of society typically bore the brunt of unethical biomedical research; Kligman's research at Holmesburg prison has become a textbook example of such unethical experimenting,[6][8][9][10][11] and has been denounced as equivalent to "the barbarity and sadism of Auschwitz and Dachau.