It is generally appreciated that DEI and CRT have infiltrated the profession of medicine and have become thoroughly entrenched in its education system. A recent byproduct of this corrosive culture has been the censure and attempted cancellation of one of the pillars of 20th-century dermatology, Dr. Howard Maibach.
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Maibach is an internationally known dermatologist who, at the age of 94, remains an emeritus professor of Dermatology at University of California San Francisco (UCSF), where he has been on the faculty since 1961. In his 63-year career in academic medicine, he has authored or co-authored over 3000 scientific journal articles and has contributed to over 150 books. He has mentored hundreds of physicians and medical students in training. Concentrated in the fields of toxicology, pharmacology, contact dermatitis, environmental skin disease, and occupational health, his decades of clinical research have resulted in bringing to market or refining many products used today by millions of consumers and physicians worldwide.
Dr. Maibach stands accused (together with his late colleague, Dr. William Epstein) by his parent institution of conducting unethical and racist clinical experiments with pesticides and herbicides on prisoners at the California Medical Facility (CMF) in the 1960s and 1970s while a UCSF faculty member. His accusers are members of an anti-racism task force (the Program for Historical Reconciliation) created by UCSF minority faculty in 2020 following the George Floyd riots. In response to the findings of this inquisition, some members of the UCSF community have called for Maibach to be removed from the faculty.
The specific charges against Maibach include allegations that proper informed consent was lacking, that minority prisoners were disproportionately represented, and that some of the subjects at CMF suffered from mental illness. They further allege that the experiments resulted in harm to the subjects, and intimate that only subjects who had medical conditions that might directly benefit from these experiments (which these volunteers lacked) were justifiable candidates for this research.
None of the above charges are compelling if even factual. The subjects were volunteers and were generously compensated for their participation. They did, according to Dr. Maibach, provide informed consent. The same clinical experiments that Maibach performed on the prison volunteers he performed on himself as well. There is no evidence that any prisoner was harmed, no evidence that black or brown prisoners were disproportionately represented, or that any specific volunteer was mentally impaired (and supposedly incapable of providing informed consent). The idea that only individuals with specific conditions who might directly benefit from the research can offer themselves as subjects is arguable at best.
As a dermatologist who trained at UCSF from 1975 to 1977 and remained a clinical faculty member while in private practice for decades after, I have known Howard Maibach for over fifty years. Dr. Maibach was Vice-Chairman of the Dermatology Department (and William Epstein was the Chairman) while I was in training. Both physicians were decent, honorable, and universally admired. Neither man was remotely racist or unethical. The clinical research that they engaged in at the CMF (a prison medical facility in Vacaville, CA, fifty miles northeast of San Francisco) was important and productive of valuable findings. Their research experiments met all the ethical and legal requirements that were in place at UCSF and CMF at that time.
It is regrettable that UCSF, the beneficiary (both academically and monetarily) of Dr. Maibach’s labors, would sanction his virulent and undeserved censure. To add insult to injury, both the vice chancellor/provost of the university and the current chairman of the Dermatology department, rather than defend their colleague against these manufactured charges, have instead issued cringeworthy public apologies for his alleged past offenses.
It’s not surprising why Maibach was chosen as a target for the activist left, which has infected academia, including medicine. He checks all of the boxes for an “oppressor” — he’s an older, white, Jewish, successful, and high-profile male. His ostensible victims were members of an “oppressed” class — poor incarcerated men of color. It would appear that in the context of this manufactured relationship, no legitimate research could be performed in the eyes of Maibach’s accusers.
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Lacking support from UCSF, Maibach has filed a lengthy petition with the Superior Court of San Francisco, challenging the university’s defamatory report. The petition asks the court to compel UCSF to provide him with previously denied records upon which their report was based, as well as those pertaining to the UCSF Program for Historical Reconciliation, which investigated him. Whether or not Maibach will seek monetary damages for this character assassination is unclear.
This embarrassing episode speaks poorly of UCSF and its timorous administrators, who were both enablers of the initial DEI task force and apologists for Dr. Maibach’s fabricated guilt. More importantly, it serves as an indictment of the woke infestation of medicine and augurs the profession’s inevitable decline.
Medical schools like UCSF are science-based institutions tasked with the specific job of turning out the best educated and technically skilled physicians. They are not megaphones for social engineering. When DEI is incorporated into the fabric of medical training, it dilutes the school’s legitimate purpose, resulting in less well-trained and more indoctrinated doctors of medicine.
To the left, monuments to this nation’s founders are racist, long-established names of some professional sports franchises and certain best-selling consumer products are racist, grades and SATs as metrics of academic proficiency are racist, and now the distant past research of accomplished doctors of medicine is racist as well.
This scenario has been repeated countless times over the past few decades, in academia, corporate America, government, and now medicine. The players are well known: a small number of vocal, often shrill, leftist activists, predominantly young, university-indoctrinated and most often female, decide to campaign for a specific woke cause, frequently race-based, to cancel either a current-day or historical offender whom they deem guilty of perceived racism or other victim class-oppression. Their older and more moderate counterparts, who wield power within the organization, fearing the loss of their jobs/tenure/income/pension and careers, offer tacit support for the activists’ ersatz cause. Because this gambit is so predictably successful, it is repeated over and over again, until each targeted organization is transformed into an unrecognizable shell of what it once was. Sadly, such appears to be the desired end game for medicine.
Postscript: On April 21, 2026, Dr. Maibach, now 97 and the longest tenured faculty member in UCSF history, filed suit in San Francisco Superior Court for defamation (including false light and civil conspiracy). In addition to the Regents of the University of California (the parent organization of UCSF), the defendants named include Dr. Daniel Lowenstein (former Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost of UCSF), Dr. Jack Resnick Jr. (current Professor and Chairman of the Dept. of Dermatology), and Drs. Brian Dolan and Aimee Medeiros (non-M.D. Professors of Humanities and Social Sciences at UCSF who co-directed the Program for Historical Reconciliation, which published its false and incendiary claims against Maibach). I would be remiss if I did not mention that all four of these defendants have completed “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Champion Training,” each according to their UCSF web profiles. Resnick is also a member of the “Skin of Color Society.”
The 76-page civil complaint is available here.
The case is currently pending. If justice (and common sense) prevails, as it is hoped, Dr. Maibach will receive a massive monetary award from UCSF as well as a public apology and injunctive relief from further defamatory statements.
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Image: University of California San Francisco.Â