The Horrors of Hepatitis Research
By Carl Elliott,
The New York Review of Books
| 11. 21. 2024
Photo "Traces of Willowbrook" by Matt Green on Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
In academic medicine, as with Confederate statuary, the mighty are starting to fall. The names of physicians once celebrated for ethically questionable research are finally being removed from medical school buildings, awards, and lectureships. In 2008 the University of Pittsburgh discontinued a lecture series named for John Cutler, one of the principal researchers in the Tuskegee syphilis study from 1932 to 1972 and the Guatemala syphilis study of the mid-1940s. Ten years later it removed the name of Thomas Parran, another Tuskegee researcher, from a building in its School of Public Health. In 2021 the University of Pennsylvania took similar measures with Albert Kligman, the dermatologist responsible for decades of barbarous experiments at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia, renaming the Kligman Professorship and phasing out a lectureship named after him. A movement is now underway at the University of Cincinnati to honor those who died in the Pentagon-funded radiation experiments conducted there in the 1960s and early 1970s by Eugene Saenger, a radiologist honored by the university with...
Related Articles
By Megan Molteni, Stat | 05.13.2025
Leading trade organizations representing the makers of cell and gene therapies are calling for a 10-year international moratorium on the use of CRISPR and other DNA-editing tools to create genetically modified children, according to a draft of the declaration provided...
By Nicolas Le Dévédec, The Conversation | 05.14.2025
The goal of transhumanists is to improve human beings so they will perform better. In doing so, they contribute above all else to creating people perfectly suited to capitalism.
It’s important to step back and take a critical look at...
By Elayne Clift, Daily Kos | 05.01.2025
Photo of Judy Heumann by Taylordw,
CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Back in the 1980s when I was a budding journalist publishing articles related to women and health while working as Program Director for the National Women’s...
By Derek Beres, The Guardian | 05.04.2025
English polymath Francis Galton formulated the concept of eugenics in 1883. Inspired by animal breeding, Galton encouraged people with “desirable” traits to procreate while discouraging or preventing those with “undesirable” traits from doing the same. As social and intellectual qualities...