Carl Elliott is the Next Speaker in the Mudd Lecture Series Elliott, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, will give a lecture on Nov. 14 at 5 p.m. in Northen Auditorium.

By Emily Innes
November 7, 2024

Carl Elliott, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, will present a lecture on Nov. 14 at 5 p.m. in Northen Auditorium in Leyburn Library as part of W&L’s Mudd Center for Ethics’ series on “How We Live & Die.”

Elliott’s lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled “The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No.” The event will also be streamed online at https://go.wlu.edu/livestream.

Elliott’s research interests include wrongdoing in medicine, especially in the areas of clinical research and pharmaceutical marketing, and philosophical issues surrounding identity, authenticity and justice through the lens of biomedical technology.

“Carl Elliott has long studied the convoluted apparatus of American medicine,” said Melissa Kerin, the director of the Mudd Center. “He has raised difficult and uncomfortable questions about the intentions and assumptions around medical practice — everything from research experimentation on drugs to practices of peddling those same pharmaceuticals. Guiding his investigations are perennial concerns about possibility and justice. His talk at W&L will highlight the stories and testimonies of those who disclose unethical medical experiments — and the cost of doing so. These instances of immoral medical experimentation and subsequent whistleblowing prompt us to question the future of bioethics, based on a justifiably distrustful past.”

As a bioethicist trained in medicine as well as philosophy, Elliott is in a unique position to consider the ethics of medical research and whistleblowers who speak out against abusive methods, such as coerced participation in experimental studies. His most recent book, which is the basis for his Nov. 14 lecture, is an intellectual inquiry into the unimaginable moral struggle whistleblowers face when exposing abusive medical research.

“The Occasional Human Sacrifice,” published in 2024, shares six stories in which patients were deceived into participating in experimental medical research programs they did not understand, and which often had astonishing and well-concealed mortality rates. The stories are framed by Elliott’s own tumultuous experience fighting for an external inquiry into a psychiatric research study at the University of Minnesota. Called a “disturbingly eye-opening read” by Kirkus Reviews, the book captures a long history of insiders who speak out against medical research abuses and the price they pay for doing the right thing, beginning with the public health worker who exposed the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study and ending with the four physicians who blew the whistle on lethal synthetic tracheal transplants at the Karolinska Institute in 2016.

Elliott attended Davidson College, the Medical University of South Carolina and Glasgow University in Scotland. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress, a resident fellowship at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, and a Weatherhead Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In addition to his faculty position at the University of Minnesota, Elliott is an affiliate faculty member in the Bioethics Centre at the University of Otago in New Zealand, where he previously completed a postdoctoral position. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Mother Jones and American Scholar.

For more information and a complete schedule of events, visit the series webpage.

The Mudd Center was established in 2010 through a gift to the university from award-winning journalist Roger Mudd, a 1950 graduate of W&L. By facilitating collaboration across traditional institutional boundaries, the center aims to encourage a multidisciplinary perspective on ethics informed by both theory and practice. Previous Mudd Center lecture series topics have included Global Ethics in the 21st Century, Race and Justice in America, The Ethics of Citizenship, Markets and Morals, Equality and Difference, The Ethics of Identity, The Ethics of Technology, Daily Ethics and Beneficence, and the Ethics of Design.