Carl Elliott Journalist Profile

Articles

Podcast: The education of a whistleblower

1 month ago | gooznews.substack.com | Merrill Goozner |Carl Elliott

Washington is awash in legal and ethical wrongdoing, especially at the nation’s health-related agencies. To pay for tax cuts for corporations and the rich, the Trump regime’s appointees are laying off thousands of workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health. Aid to treat and prevent global diseases has been abandoned. Plans are afoot to slash funding for the nation’s researchers.
The Horrors of Hepatitis Research | Carl Elliott

Oct 31, 2024 | nybooks.com | Carl Elliott

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

Jun 1, 2024 | literaryreview.co.uk | Carl Elliott

In 2008, Dr Paolo Macchiarini, a charismatic Swiss-Italian surgeon, began to perform daring transplants using synthetic tracheas made of plastic and seeded with the patients’ stem cells. It sounded like science fiction, but the results were compelling and were published widely in prestigious medical journals. Macchiarini was elected soon after to head a research team at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, the renowned medical institution that awards the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Professor's book investigates shocking medical research abuse

May 22, 2024 | kansascity.com | Carl Elliott

Movies such as "Erin Brockovich" depict whistleblowers as heroes who undergo tough times before earning the satisfaction that they've benefited humanity. University of Minnesota philosophy professor Carl Elliott says that's not how it usually goes down. Elliott, whose book "The Occasional Human Sacrifice" is out this month, knows from experience.
How the Karolinska protected Paolo Macchiarini - and whistleblowers paid the price

May 17, 2024 | retractionwatch.com | Carl Elliott |Ivan Oransky

Retraction Watch readers may recall the story of Paolo Macchiarini, about whom we first wrote in 2012 before he became the subject of international scrutiny — and who has now been sentenced to prison. We are pleased to present an excerpt about the Macchiarini case from The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No by Carl Elliott published by W. W. Norton, May 2024.
In medicine, the morally unthinkable too easily comes to seem normal

May 10, 2024 | sltrib.com | Carl Elliott

Here is the way I remember it: The year is 1985, and a few medical students are gathered around an operating table where an anesthetized woman has been prepared for surgery. The attending physician, a gynecologist, asks the group: "Has everyone felt a cervix? Here's your chance." One after another, we take turns inserting two gloved fingers into the unconscious woman's vagina. Had the woman consented to a pelvic exam?
THE OCCASIONAL HUMAN SACRIFICE

Feb 15, 2024 | kirkusreviews.com | Carl Elliott |David Grann |Howard Zinn

A striking account of medical malfeasance and the whistleblowers who have fought against it. Though he graduated from medical school, Elliott, author of White Coat, Black Hat, never practiced and now teaches philosophy, including a course on scandals in medical research and those who blew the whistle. In Hollywood movies, whistleblowers often struggle courageously before crushing the villain.
The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No|Hardcover

Jan 25, 2024 | barnesandnoble.com | Carl Elliott

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.