Second Annual Shine Lecture Explores ‘The Dark Side of Research’ and the Influence of Money on Medicine.
Carl Elliott, author of White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine, is the featured speaker at the Second Annual Cathy Shine Lecture and will present “The Dark Side of Research: Exploitation in Clinical Trials.”
Elliott’s research offers surprising examples of the influence of market forces on medicine. His studies of clinical trials reveal what physicians may not know — from a university’s refusal to investigate a student’s death to the source of research subjects recruited by commercial companies. A physician and bioethicist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, Elliott is also respected as a courageous social commentator, with articles like “Guinea Pigging” in the New Yorker.
A native South Carolinian, Elliott was educated at Davidson College in North Carolina and at Glasgow University in Scotland, where he received his PhD in philosophy. He received his MD from the Medical University of South Carolina. Prior to his appointment at the University of Minnesota in 1997 he was on the faculty of McGill University in Montreal.
He has held postdoctoral or visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, East Carolina University, the University of Otago (New Zealand) and the University of Natal Medical School (now the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine), the first medical school in South Africa for non-white students. In 2003-04 he was Visiting Associate Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he led a seminar on the social implications of bioethics.
The family of the late Cathy Shine, who died in 1992 from a severe asthma attack, endowed a lectureship in her memory to be organized each year by the Department of Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights at BUSPH. The gift recognizes the scholarly work of Department Chair Professor George Annas, who wrote about the Shine case in 1999 as an example of the importance of respecting patient rights. In making the gift, the Shine family noted that Cathy Shine admired Annas’s work, especially his book The Rights of Patients.
Two years before Shine’s death, she suffered a traumatic experience in which medical treatment against her will damaged her trust in physicians. In a wrongful death suit filed by her family on Shine’s behalf, The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court later affirmed “the right of a competent individual to refuse medical treatment,” even life-saving treatment.
According to her family, Cathy Shine was a strong advocate for human rights and patient rights. Before her death, she co-authored a book about race-based discrimination in criminal justice administration, Does the Punishment Fit the Crime, published after her death by the Sentencing Project.
The lecture series is sponsored by the Department of Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights at Boston University School of Public Health
Second Annual Cathy Shine Lecture
Thursday, March 8th
12-1 PM
Free and Open to the Public
Room L-110 (a reception will follow in L-109)
sph.bu.edu/Shine2012