The Price of Saying No: Blowing the Whistle on Abuses in Medical Research

Reception to Follow. Whistleblowers often pay a terrible price for speaking out against abuses in clinical research. Why do they take the risk and what can we learn from their experiences? This lecture will explore stories of whistleblowers over the past 50 years as well as the speaker's own experiences in exposing wrongdoing. Carl Elliott, MD, PhD is a professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota and the author of The Occasional Human Sacrifice as well as Better than Well and White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine. Dr. Elliott serves as the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, a resident fellowship at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, and a Weatherhead Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Mother Jones and The American Scholar. He has been a visiting faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Sydney, and the University of Otago, where he is an affiliate of the Bioethics Centre. The Nancy Weaver Emerson Lectureship in Medical Ethics was established in 1997 to honor Nancy Weaver Emerson whose legacy shows us that patients can be our most courageous and extraordinary partners in advancing research, treatment, education and policy.