The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No 

Wednesday, May 22nd from Noon – 1 p.m in COHS 3130 & on Zoom

From noon to 1:00 PM on Wednesday, May 22nd, the UCI Center for Health Ethics is hosting an in-person and online book talk on whistleblowing by Carl Elliott, MD, PhD, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. The in-person event will take place in COHS 3130 at the UCI Health Sciences Complex on 856 Health Sciences Quad. individuals unable to attend in-person and wanting to participate on Zoom should register in advance here.

Professor Elliott will discuss his new book, The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No. Published May 14 by W.W. Norton & Company, Elliott’s book examines six notorious cases of abusive medical research and explores the actions and experiences of the whistleblowers who helped expose these instances of wrongdoing. The cases extend from the infamous U.S. Public Health Service Untreated Syphilis Study that took place from 1932 to 1972 and involved six hundred black men from whom informed consent was not obtained and established treatments were deliberately withheld, to the disturbing Dan Markingson case at the University of Minnesota, and the recent regenerative medicine research scandal featuring thoracic surgeon Paolo Macchiarini and the Karolinska Institute.

Kirkus Reviews describes the book as “a disturbingly eye-opening must-read.” Additional information about the book can be found in a guest essay published by The New York Times, an interview published in the Boston Globe, an NPR interview on 1A, a Noncompliant podcast episode, an interview published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and a commentary in Biopolitical Times.

Professor Elliott’s previous publications include Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream, White Coat Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine, and A Philosophical Disease: Bioethics, Culture, and Identity. Elliott is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress, and a Weatherhead Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

Individuals wanting to learn more about this event are welcome to contact Professor and UCI Center for Health Ethics Director Leigh Turner at leigh.turner@UCI.edu. For attendees traveling to the UCI College of Health Sciences Building by vehicle and requiring parking, parking-related information is available here.