Elizabeth Svoboda: “What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness” Originally Undark.
Carl Elliott is, by his own estimation, a timid marvel. A bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, when he was a medical student he was ordered to perform a bone marrow biopsy. Afraid to ask for help, he faked a procedure he’d never tried before, leaving the patient groaning in pain. And when he saw a resident administer intravenous naloxone to a benzodiazepine-dazed patient in a futile and probably harmful attempt to wake him up, Elliott kept quiet. “Did I know this was wrong? I did,” Elliott writes. “Did I object? No, I didn’t.”
It’s a paradoxical way to begin a book-length study of the whistleblower group to which Elliott himself belongs, but the understated tone is also appropriate.Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Cost of Saying “No”Equal parts investigative journalism, history and memoir, this novel’s greatest strength is that the people who expose medical fraud are not heroes, at least not in the Hollywood redemptive sense. Bennett Omalu Or like Erin Brockovich, who became famous for spotlighting corruption and ushering in change, and whose story was eventually made into a movie. Scientific Whistleblower Their work goes unnoticed and rarely brings justice to victims. By speaking out, they may be sacrificing their career prospects and leaving them with only one bleak question: Was this really worth it?
Like journalist Tom Mueller “Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Deception” Though it features case studies on whistle-blowing in a broader sense, Elliott’s book unfolds as a series of character profiles. He interviews a host of dissidents, from Peter Buxton, who exposed the US government’s Tuskegee syphilis study, in which black men were denied treatment, to John Pesand, who sounded the alarm about bone marrow transplant protocols that killed cancer patients. Elliott analyzes the whistleblowers’ morality with nuance and sensitivity, depicting the whistleblowers’ increasingly cynical and embittered withdrawal into themselves as they are frustrated by not being heard by those in power. Of Buxton, Elliott says, “There’s an air about him that fears the world is full of fools and scoundrels.”
Sadly, that defensiveness may end up alienating even more people, especially those who question the activists’ underlying motives: “From the outside, it can be hard to know whether a potential whistle-blower is an honest dissenter or a crazed conspiracy theorist,” Elliott writes.
That Elliott is himself a member of the disgruntled whistle-blowers club lends weight to such statements. More than 15 years ago, he read an article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press about the unethical tactics his University of Minnesota colleague, Professor Steven Olson, was using to recruit and retain subjects for a study of the antipsychotic drug Seroquel. One of the subjects, 26-year-old Dan Markinson, who had signed a consent form despite suffering from mental illness, committed suicide after taking Seroquel for a few months. Markinson’s mental health had worsened since he began taking the drug, but his mother, Mary Weiss, pleaded with him to be removed from the study, but her pleas were ignored.
Appalled by Markinson’s fate and concerned for the other subjects, Elliott took action. Fraud expose article He wrote about the Seroquel study for Mother Jones magazine, filed a complaint with the university and explored ways to encourage an outside investigation of the study.
But like the whistleblower’s interviewees, Elliott was often ignored and humiliated. He saw firsthand what happens when moral motivations clash with social expediency, the protection of organizational competence. When Elliott cited his compromised Seroquel research in a university lecture, “the Q&A felt like what sociologists call a ‘ritual of humiliation,'” he writes. His faculty at the University of Minnesota were infuriated that he had raised the subject. “I remember returning to my office, crawling under my desk and fighting the intense urge to open a bottle of Jack Daniels at 9 a.m.”
An even more tragic fate befell Mary Wyeth. Lawsuit filed After her son’s death, Weiss sued the University of Minnesota for negligence in its research into Seroquel. Her lawsuit failed when a judge declared the university “exempt,” leaving Weiss with a bill for more than $56,000 in legal costs. Weiss subsequently suffered a stroke and died several years later after a live-in caregiver diverted money from her bank account, Elliott wrote. There was no funeral.
Why do health care whistleblowers risk being tarnished while most others remain silent? Elliott’s answer is complex and contradictory, but perhaps deliberate. On the one hand, he points out a pragmatic rationale for intervention: “The act of whistleblowing is based on the belief that exposing a moral outrage will be enough for others to respond,” he writes.
But the stories of his interviewees, and his own, suggest that whistleblowers’ primary motivation is more idealistic. They don’t act because they expect a particular outcome, but from an inner drive, a sense that their existence will become intolerable if they don’t speak up. “How can you stand by and allow this to happen?” one research coordinator, using the pseudonym Sasha, told Elliott after reporting an investigator who had falsified study data. “Go to sleep at night and look at yourself in the mirror. You don’t understand.”
Yet Elliott is reluctant to moralize whistleblowers, arguing that social psychologist Philip Zimbardo: Heroes are ordinary people Elliott emphasizes that in many ways, whistleblowers are just as human and flawed as the rest of us, and that some, like himself, have obeyed immoral superiors. “Like a subject in Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments, I did as I was told,” he writes, recalling his time as a young doctor. “The possibility of dissent never occurred to me.”
But Elliott leaves largely unexplored the intriguing question of what makes someone who would never think of dissent come to believe that dissent is not only possible but necessary.
Recent research suggests that exacerbated regret plays a role, as in Elliot’s case. 2022 SurveyPotential whistleblowers were motivated by the expectation that they would regret not speaking up. Ensuring social support For example, managers in a workplace who create an ethical atmosphere will encourage those who witness wrongdoing to blow the whistle.
Elliott doesn’t go into much detail about how to successfully blow the whistle, but Not so scaryBut his own experience has perhaps led him away from such an optimistic framework. Despite serious flaws reported by an external investigation into the University of Minnesota’s research oversight program, no one at the university has accepted responsibility for what happened to the Seroquel study subjects. “It can be hard for whistleblowers to justify actions that have achieved so little at such great cost,” Elliott writes. “They need a story that makes their sacrifices meaningful.”
Elliott despises the Hollywood story, but his book excels in that it tries to make a cogent one. By bringing to the fore the deeds of lesser-known whistleblowers, he bends their story in a direction that is, albeit subtly, righteous. Years after their accusations, Peter Baxtan, John Pesand, Mary Weiss, and even Carl Elliott are still coming of age.
