Seminars and Panels
During the early twentieth century, medical researchers rarely experimented on healthy human beings who had no debt to the state. By the end of the century, millions of healthy people with full civil rights enrolled in medical experiments each year. This talk explains how serving as a “normal control” became the norm and sustained American medicine in the postwar decades—to the extend that the death of a human subject could be managed administratively as a “routine tragedy.” Using the case of the US National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center, the talk argues that this shift was made possible through a series of unprecedented relationships between American colleges, church organizations, and government agencies in the decades following World War II.
The story follows the everyday lives of religious service workers, unemployed laborers, and college students who lived inside the Clinical Center for months and sometimes years while they served as research material (and also looked for work, witnessed the life of Jesus, and earned college credit). The book draws on a new vernacular archive that includes three types of materials: oral history interviews that Stark completed with nearly one hundred former normal patients; ephemera from interviewees’ time at the Clinical Center (including correspondence, photographs, and keepsakes) donated to Stark’s project; and NIH’s medical records of the studies that former participants released to Stark at the time of their interview. The project also brings together for the first time materials from established historical collections of the US government and of dozens of church organizations and colleges that send young people to NIH. By taking seriously the pillow fights and the first kisses, the bible clubs and the movie nights, that animated the NIH clinic as much as the medical experiments, the project suggests how scholars might refigure settings conventionally understood in exclusively medical terms.
About Professor Laura Stark
Laura Stark is Assistant Professor at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Associate Editor of the journal History & Theory.
She is author of Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research, which was published in 2012 by University of Chicago Press. She is also author of several articles and chapters on science, the state and social theory. Her current research explores research settings through the lives of “normal control” research subjects enrolled in the first clinical trials at the US National Institutes of Health after World War II. Laura received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University in 2006; was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Science in Human Culture at Northwestern University from 2006 to 2008; and held a Stetten Fellowship at the Office of NIH History at the National Institutes of Health from 2008 to 2009.
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- 2017 - 2018
- 2016 - 2017
- Behavioral Concepts and the Sciences of Human Behavior
H. Longino Apr 21, 2017 - Insane Asylums and Genetics: How Human Heredity Became a Data Science
T. Porter Feb 17, 2017 - The Nature of Pride: The Emotional Origins of Social Rank
J. Tracy Jan 23, 2017
- Behavioral Concepts and the Sciences of Human Behavior
- 2015 - 2016
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Public Ethics, Politics and Sociobiology
M. P. Sheldon Mar 11, 2016 -
Classifying People by Color: How Racial Categories Change Over Time
A. A. Martinez Feb 29, 2016 -
The Origin of Social Impulse: E.O. Wilson's Recent and Controversial Rejection of Kin Selection in Historical Context
A. Gibson Dec 4, 2015
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Public Ethics, Politics and Sociobiology
- 2014 - 2015
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Special Event: Lone Star History of Science Meeting Writing the Origin with Burned Fingers: Darwin's Penance for the "Sin of Speculation"A. Sponsel Apr 3, 2015 - Welfare, Work, and Witness: Why Clinical Research Can Survive the Death of a Healthy Human Subject
L. Stark Apr 3, 2015 - The Distinctive Significance of Systemic Risk
A. James Mar 6, 2015 - The Devil's Heritage: Masuo Kodani, the "Nisei Problem," and Social Stratification at the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Japan (1946-1954)
V.B. Smocovitis Jan 28, 2015 - Atypical Combinations and Scientific Impact
B. Uzzi Dec 8, 2014 - Psychology of Science and Technology
M. Gorman Nov 17, 2014 - How Economics Shapes Science
P. Stephan Sep 10, 2014
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- 2013 - 2014
- The Decision to Put David Vetter in the Bubble
J. H. Jones Apr 16, 2014 - Ethical Paradoxes of
Control: Science, Engineering, and the Expansion of Moral ResponsibilityR. Hollander Mar 3, 2014 - 'Broken Symmetry': Humanism, Militarism, and the Dilemmas of Scientific Identity in Nuclear Age America.
J. Wang Feb 17, 2014 - Using Creative Non-Fiction in Teaching Research Ethics
C.M. Klugman Dec 2, 2013 - Does Neuroscience Undermine Responsibility?
W. Sinnott-Armstrong Nov 15, 2013 - Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism
J. Hamblin Oct 18, 2013
- The Decision to Put David Vetter in the Bubble
- 2012 - 2013
- Lead Wars: the Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children
D. Rosner Mar 25, 2013 - Identifying potential pitfalls in the quantitative appraisal system for scientific careers
A.M. Petersen Dec 3, 2012 - Keeping Secrets: Scientists' strategic management of militarization, 1945-1980
S. Lindee Nov 12, 2012 - Evolutionary Theory as Methodological Anesthesia: Methodological and Philosophical Lessons from Evolutionary Psychology
R.N. Boyd Oct 19, 2012 - Panel on Peer-Review Issues
Oct 11, 2012
- Can technology enable cities to cope with the economic winter?
A. Hampapur Sep 21, 2012
- Lead Wars: the Politics of Science and the Fate of America's Children
- 2011 - 2012
- Engineering Success and Failure on 9/11
S.K.A. Pfatteicher Apr 27, 2012 - Regulating Ionizing Radiation: Flawed Standard, Flawed Ethics
K.S. Frechette Mar 5, 2012 - Do fish feel pain?
C. Allen Jan 25, 2012 - The Ethics of Relevancy
J. Levine Dec 13, 2011 - ORI Cases and How to Protect Yourself from Research Misconduct in Your Labratory
A.R. Price Nov 7, 2011
- Engineering Success and Failure on 9/11