This talk is a part of the Composite Bodies seminar series. It is free and open to the public. REGISTER FOR ZOOM LINK.

The right of US patients and research subjects to give or withhold consent is widely assumed to be protected by law, but for decades medical research has been conducted on trauma victims and others without their consent, or even their knowledge.

Harriet A. Washington’s research exposes the ways in which the law fails U.S. medical-research system and how other research subverts legal protections and regularly violates patient, civil, and human rights. She explains why people of color are often especially vulnerable. Her work illuminates the record of nonconsensual testing of dangerous and sometimes lethal treatments among civilians, revealing the untrustworthiness of our nation’s profit-based system of medical research.

About the Speakers

Harriet A. Washington is a prolific science writer, editor and ethicist who is the author of the seminal Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Experimentation from Colonial Times to the Present, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award and five other well-received books,  including A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind as well as the  forthcoming Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Informed Consent in Medical Research , will be published in 2021 by Columbia Global Reports. She has written widely for popular publications and has been published in refereed books and journals such as Nature, JAMA, The American Journal of Public Health, The New England Journal of Medicine,  the Harvard Public Health Review, Isis,  and The Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. She has been Editor of the Harvard Journal of Minority Public Health, a guest Editor of the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics and served as  a reviewer for the Journal of the American Association of Bioethics and the Humanities.   

Caroline Light is Senior Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University

Patricia Williams is University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University

About the Series

In a moment where our collective health depends on technological innovation – including “contact tracing” through the collection and storage of cell phone data – visual, biometric, and other forms surveillance collect us as pinpoints of data. Composite Bodies takes up questions of technology, surveillance, embodiment, and power from an intersectional feminist lens. Through critical engagements with law, philosophy, art, history, bioethics, criminology, and advocacy, this series will address how the machine measurement and tracking of bodies are reconceptualizing notions of privacy while complicating the boundaries of the body as an integrated whole, reproducing and reinforcing biases based on race, class, gender, and other historically disabling taxonomies.

Composite Bodies is a partnership between the Mahindra Humanities Center (MHC), the Northeastern University Humanities Center, and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard. It is convened by Caroline Light (Senior Lecture on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University) and Patricia Williams (University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities, Northeastern University).

All MHC event times are in Eastern Time.

Composite Bodies is a partnership between the Mahindra Humanities Center, the Northeastern Humanities Center, and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard. It is convened by Caroline Light (Senior Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University) and Patricia Williams (University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities, Northeastern University).