Has Medical Education Gone Woke?

An attempt to cancel medical giant Dr. Howard Maibach demonstrates how deeply DEI and CRT have penetrated modern medicine. 

Michael A. Gromet, M.D. | July 28, 2026

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.

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........

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