The high cost of medical whistleblowing

If you worked in medicine and saw something unethical, would you speak up? Would you report your boss or colleagues?    

That’s the situation that confronted Carl Elliott, a medical school graduate and philosophy professor who at the time was working as a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

He blew the whistle on his employer after a vulnerable man died by suicide while enrolled in a psychiatric drug study. After being ignored by university officials and dropped by colleagues, Elliott was vindicated years later when a state inquiry corroborated his concerns.  

The experience left him shaken and curious. What happens to other whistleblowers?   

In his new book, “The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No,” Elliott interviews the people who spoke up against wrongdoing in six medical research studies.  

They range from the public health social worker who exposed the Tuskegee syphilis study to the young doctor who blew the whistle on a Seattle cancer center for enrolling uninformed patients in an experimental transplant study that was more likely to kill them than a standard treatment.  

MPR News guest host Euan Kerr talked with Elliott about what motivates whistleblowers, the isolation and hopelessness that accompanies speaking out and what could make it easier to report and stop unethical medical research.  

Guest:

• Carl Elliott is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota and previously a professor of bioethics in the University of Minnesota Medical School. He writes for academic journals and publications such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times. He’s written seven books including “Better Than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream” and “White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine.” His most recent book published in May is about whistleblowers in medical research, “The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No.”  

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.  

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.