Medical Consent and the Vulnerable

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In Carte Blanche, Harriet A. Washington, author of the award-winning history of medical racism Medical Apartheid, tells a shocking story about researchers departing from what should be an inviolable ethic of informed consent before enrollment in medical research. Using a wide range of examples, Washington shows how subjects—disproportionately Black—are given experimental substances they haven’t agreed to, often with harmful results. This panel will be a discussion of the problem and what to do about it.

Washington will be in conversation with Jelani Cobb, Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, and Olajide A. Williams, professor of neurology at Columbia University Irvine Medical Center.