Carte Blanche is a wake-up call to the many times researchers have skirted laws about informed consent and jeopardized a participant’s right to know. Washington has a laser-focus ability to make sense of complex statistics, target obfuscating data, put in context historical records and truly empathize with the accounts of those who have experienced what she calls “investigative servitude”—harm from the deterioration of informed consent, an important human right. Editors of the Intima spoke with her about how this groundbreaking exposé has an even more heightened importance during this challenging decade.
Read moreCarte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent by Harriet A. Washington
“Urgent, alarming, riveting, and essential, Carte Blanche reveals that Americans, including African Americans, are still being medically experimented upon without their consent—yet again in research sanctioned by law. Harriet Washington’s powerful indictment of ongoing medical coercion unveils a gross violation of our human rights,” says Ibram X. Kendi. “It is vital reading at a moment when change is so necessary.” Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent is published by Columbia Global Reports, an imprint that’s producing four to six novella-length works of journalism and analysis a year, each on a different under-reported story in the world.