Allen and Anthony’s
Holmesburg horror story

By Diane Prokop
Times Staff Writer

Allen Hornblum decided his groundbreaking 1998 work, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison: A True Story of Abuse and Exploitation in the name of Medical Science, called for a more personal account.
The book, which brought national attention to the issue, documented the research conducted by University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Dr. Albert M. Kligman between the 1950s and 1970s for at least 33 major pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies, as well as mind-control experiments for the U.S. Army and Central Intelligence Agency.
In his new follow-up book, Sentenced to Science: One Black Man’s Story of Imprisonment in America, Hornblum has set out to tell the story of "guinea pig" Edward "Butch" Anthony to make the subject more accessible for those outside of academic circles. Still, the book is far from a beach read.
The author, a lecturer of geography and urban studies at Temple University, characterized the book as watching a train wreck — as the "real" A Million Little Pieces, the pseudo-memoir that got author James Frey in trouble for blending a lot of fiction with fact in his best-selling book about coping with harrowing addictions.
"To my surprise in discussing bioethics," Hornblum said, "there has never been a book by and about a human guinea pig . . . on what it was like being a test subject."
The graphic account explores Anthony’s life while growing up in a strict Baptist home in North Philadelphia, particularly the hell-on-earth roads he took from there that led him to become so strung out on drugs that he’d collapse next to an overdosed dead body and be unable to do anything about it. Those roads also led him to do time in Holmesburg Prison — and become a human guinea pig who accepted paltry pay to endure torturous product tests and also treatments for after-effects that still cause him trouble some 40 years later.
Though it took him 20 years in and out of prison to overcome the habits of drugs and bad choices, Anthony, 64, is an upstanding citizen these days who goes by his Muslim name Yusef.
He was just 20 when he was first arrested for selling marijuana to an undercover cop and wound up in Holmesburg Prison.
"They planned it well. If you were in Holmesburg and didn’t have any money, you were in trouble," Anthony recalled while chatting at the Cafe Brazil in Oxford Circle a couple weeks ago.
A few bucks in his commissary account wasn’t the only reason Anthony wanted to participate in the "safe" experiments. Being part of the University of Pennsylvania testing got him off his cellblock and away from the sexual horrors and power struggles that were an everyday occurrence at the ’Burg, he explained.
Anthony said he has known many a man who entered prison to serve a two-year sentence for a misdemeanor but wound up being there far longer for being part of the violence that highlighted sexual powerplays among inmates.
"To tell the truth," Anthony says in Hornblum’s latest book, "I was more afraid of being sexually assaulted down there than the experiments."
He’d been brought up to look upon doctors as saviors, he explained. However, after the prison experiments and the accompanying pain, he came to regard them as "Frankensteins" who provided no follow-up care after the tests were done.
His first round, Anthony said, was a safety trial for a Johnson & Johnson bubble bath, for which he was paid $37. It was administered with the assistance of a fellow inmate in a white lab coat who ripped off six patches of Anthony’s skin with adhesive tape as the first step of a painful cosmetics test that still haunts him today.
Not only did his back feel on fire during the skin-patch removal, but he broke out in red, strawberry-like blisters that filled with pus. It was so bad, Anthony recalled, that his food tray was brought to his cell because guards feared that his appearance would cause a disturbance in the chow hall.
His sister Edna’s reaction was just as telling.
"She took one look at me and started screaming," Anthony says in the book. "She jumped out of her chair in horror. She was jumping up and down, yelling, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, what did they do to you?’ She was holding her hand to her mouth like she was trying to keep from vomiting."
That doesn’t even scratch the surface of the nauseating accounts in Sentenced to Science. Anthony has experienced flare-ups over the years, especially when his sensitive skin comes into contact with certain acidic foods and cleaning chemicals.
His nails grew into thick claws that had to be trimmed with a wood file. His hands swelled to the size of boxing gloves; his 10-1/2 size feet ballooned to a need for 14 EEE sandals. According to Anthony, the smell was just as tough to take, that of rotting flesh.
In 1974, he was hospitalized with one particularly bad relapse and infection that caused medical personnel at the old Philadelphia General Hospital in West Philadelphia to cut and peel off a "half-inch flap of petrified meat that was Yusef’s palm," Hornblum notes in his book. The procedure also had to be done to his other hand and his feet.
The bubble-bath test wasn’t the only one that Anthony signed up for. Readers of the book will sense that he’s going to sign up for another product experiment, with bad results, just as they’ll learn how he got out of jail and embarked on a search for heroin.
The torture of being a human guinea pig in prison is just part of Anthony’s story. For anyone who knows someone who has gone through the roller-coaster hell of drug addiction, Sentenced to Science can be all too real.
Most people would hope that bringing to light the practice of using prisoners and other disenfranchised populations for experimentation would prevent it from ever happening again. Hope may not be enough. Hornblum believes it could happen again.
"There are some people both in government and bioethics who think prison is the right place for medical research," he said.
Just last year, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences concluded in a 300-page report, Ethical Considerations for Research Involving Prisoners, that "research affords the potential of great benefit."
If permitted to move forward with the practice, for those people who might have a drug problem and wind up in the system, their addiction may be just the beginning of a lifetime nightmare, he added. His research indicated that a significant part of the inmate population is behind bars for situations linked to alcohol or drugs.
"They’re already used to abusing themselves," Hornblum said. ••
Reporter Diane Prokop can be reached at 215-354-3036 or dprokop@phillynews.com