Why Aren't There More Whistleblowers?

Abstract

In The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No, bioethicist Carl Elliot seeks to understand people who blow the whistle on unethical human research projects. The book compares whistleblowers in six scandals, and Elliot's main explanation for why someone becomes a whistleblower is personal honor. Exploring what led to or might have prevented these scandals, Elliot is critical of institutional review boards, and he links research ethics violations to injustices in everyday clinical care and medical training and to power imbalances in medical institutions. Some of the clinical and scientific details in the cases suggest other moral and ethical problems and the increasing irrelevance of the practice-research distinction. Whistleblowers are also needed for the mass experiments that occur when practices diffuse without robust evidence and for the structural inequalities on which American clinical care, teaching, and research depend.