Winthrop Rockefeller Distinguished Lecture: “Medical Apartheid… and Beyond”

Harriet A. Washington is a science writer, editor and ethicist who is the author of Medical Apartheid, the first social history of medical research with African Americans, was chosen as one of Publishers’ Weekly Best Books of 2006. The book also won the National Book Critics Circle Nonfiction Award, a PEN award, 2007 Gustavus Myers Award, and Nonfiction Award of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Experts have praised its scholarship, accuracy and insights. Ms. Washington wrote Medical Apartheidwhile she was a research fellow in ethics at Harvard Medical School. More recently Ms. Washington has published, Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Informed Consent in Medical Research (2021, Columbia Global Reports); and A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind. She has been the 2015-2016 Miriam Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada’s Black Mountain Institute, a Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School, Visiting Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. She has also held fellowships at Stanford University, and teaches bioethics at Columbia University, where she delivered the 2020 commencement speech to Columbia’s School of Public Health graduates, and won the 2020 Mailman School of Public Health’s Public Health Leadership Award, as well as the 2020-21 Kenneth and Mamie Clark Distinguished Lecture Award. In 2016, she was elected a Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, and in 2021, the American Medical Writers Association gave her the Walter C. Alvarez Award.

Her work provided the basis for the AMA’s apology to the nation’s black physicians in 2008 and led to the banishment of the James Marion Sims statue from Central Park in 2018.

Ms. Washington has written widely for popular magazines, newspapers, and science publications and has been published in peer-reviewed 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, Medizin und Ethik in der Pandemie APuZ 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 is a reviewer for the Journal of the American Association of Bioethics and the Humanities. Her other books include Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We “Catch” Mental Illness, and Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself.

A film buff and lover of baroque music, Ms. Washington has also worked as manager of a poison-control center, a classical-music announcer for public radio station WXXI-FM in Rochester, NY and she curates a medical-film series.