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

Book Synopsis: Shocking cases of abusive medical research and the whistleblowers who spoke out against them, sometimes at the expense of their careers. Carl Elliott is a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota who was trained in medicine as well as philosophy. For many years he fought to expose a psychiatric research study at his own university in which an especially vulnerable patient lost his life. Elliott’s efforts alienated friends and colleagues, and the university stonewalled him and denied wrongdoing until a state investigation finally vindicated his claims. This experience frames the six stories in this book of medical research in which patients allegedly gave their “consent” to participate in experimental programs they did not understand, many of which had astonishing and well-concealed mortality rates. Beginning with the public health worker who exposed the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and ending with the four surgeons who blew the whistle in 2016 on lethal synthetic trachea transplants, Elliott tells the stories of insiders who spoke out against such abuses, and often paid a terrible price for doing the right thing.