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

Medical research whistleblowers expose unethical studies for their own peace of mind, though doing so often leaves them feeling isolated and betrayed, according to this riveting study. Bioethicist Elliot (White Coat, Black Hat) digs into the whistleblower mindset by profiling six of them and reflecting on his own daunting experience exposing a psychiatric drug study that resulted in a research subject’s suicide. His most notable interviewee is Peter Buxton, who blew the whistle on the notorious Tuskegee experiment, in which Black men with syphilis went untreated in a study designed to track the disease’s progression. Despite spending seven years battling to end the experiment, Buxton goes unmentioned in most accounts, partly because of the unusual way he became involved—as a syphilis contact tracer in 1970s San Francisco, he stumbled upon Tuskegee almost by happenstance. Buxton stands out among Elliot’s subjects for having come through emotionally unscathed—he is serene in his certainty that “Nazi medicine” must always be opposed, and thus that his only choice was to fight. But the same inevitability was a source of anguish for the others, who perceived themselves as hopelessly boxed in; whistleblowing was “the only choice they had.” Detailing the extreme pressures to stay loyal that whistleblowers face, Elliott paints a damning portrait of the medical community’s workplace culture. Readers will be outraged and enthralled. (May)