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Jerome Tobis Endowed Lecture – Lonesome Whistle: Why medical researchers stay silent about wrongdoing

In 1972, Peter Buxtun blew the whistle on the Tuskegee syphilis study, the most notorious case of unethical medical research in American history: Since that time, the United States has many alarming research scandals, but the whistleblowers have exposed very few. Why do most doctors and nurses remain silent when research subjects are being exploited or abused?

Carl Elliott is Professor in the Center for Bioethics and the Department of Pediatrics, and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Minnesota. He is the author or editor of seven books, including White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine (Beacon, 2010) and Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream (Norton, 2003.) His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The London Review of Books, Mother Jones, The New York Times and The New England Journal of Medicine. In 2011 the Austen Riggs Center awarded him its Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media.

A native South Carolinian, Elliott was educated at Davidson College in North Carolina and at Glasgow University in Scotland, where he received his PhD in philosophy. He received his MD from the Medical University of South Carolina. Prior to his appointment at the University of Minnesota in 1997 he was on the faculty of McGill University in Montreal. He has held postdoctoral or visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, East Carolina University, the University of Otago in New Zealand, and the University of Natal Medical School (now the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine), the first medical school in South Africa for non-white students. He has been a Network Fellow at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a Visiting Associate Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He is a Fellow of the Hastings Center, an Honorary Member of the Caribbean Bioethics Society, and a recipient of an Outstanding Faculty Award from the University of Minnesota’s Council of Graduate Students. He blogs at Fear and Loathing in Bioethics.

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