The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No, with Carl Elliott

The Walter H. Capps Center for the Study of Ethics, Religion, and Public Life will present a talk by Carl Elliott (UMN), “The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No,” on May 23, 2024, at 5:00pm in UCSB’s McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020). This event is free and open to the public.

In this lecture, Carl Elliott will discuss his new book, The Occasional Human Sacrifice, an intellectual inquiry into the moral struggle that whistleblowers face, and why it is not the kind of struggle that most people imagine. For many years, Elliott fought for an external investigation into a psychiatric research study at his university in which a patient lost his life. This experience frames six stories in which patients were deceived into participating in studies that were risky and often lethal. Elliott tells the stories of medical insiders who spoke out against such abuses, and often paid a terrible price for doing the right thing.

Carl Elliott is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, and the Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress.