Harriet A. Washington

Harriet A. Washington is an award-winning medical writer, author, and ethicist. As a medical ethicist, she deconstructs the politics around medical issues. In addition to giving an abundance of historically accurate information on scientific racism, she paints a powerful and disturbing portrait of medicine, race, sex, and the abuse of power by telling individual human stories. Washington also makes the case for broader political consciousness of science and technology, challenging audiences to see the world differently and challenge established paradigms in the history of medicine.

Her latest book, "Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent," is the alarming tale of how the right of Americans to say “no” to risky medical research is being violated. Patients' right to give or withhold consent is supposed to be protected by law, but for decades medical research has been conducted on trauma victims ― who are disproportionately people of color ― without their consent or even their knowledge. She is also the author of "A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind," "Infectious Madness: The Surprising Science of How We "Catch" Mental Illness," and "Deadly Monopolies: The Shocking Corporate Takeover of Life Itself." Her book "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Experimentation from Colonial Times to the Present" won a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award.

Washington has held numerous prestigious fellowships including the Writing Fellowship in Bioethics at Harvard Medical School, the Miriam Shearing Fellowship at the University of Nevada's Black Mountain Institute, and a Research Fellowship in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard TH 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 teaches bioethics at Columbia University, where she was awarded both the Mailman School Of Public Health’s Public Health Leadership Award and the 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. ‘

Washington has been published in popular magazines, newspapers, science publications, and peer-reviewed books and journals such as Nature, JAMA, American Journal of Public Health, New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard Public Health Review, Isis, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, and the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. She has worked as Editor of the Harvard Journal of Minority Public Health, as 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.

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