Between 1942 and 1972, ten groups of U.S. Army sponsored scientists conducted experiments deliberately infecting people with hepatitis. In total, the research teams enrolled more than 3700 subjects including conscientious objectors, prison inmates, and residents of institutions for the developmentally disabled. Sydney Halpern’s book, Dangerous Medicine: The Story behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis (Yale University Press, 2021), examines rationale underpinning this sustained research effort, injuries it caused subjects, and controversies erupting before the studies’ termination. In this year's Joseph I. Waring Lecture, Halpern will discuss the program’s fraught trajectory and what its history suggests for current debates about the ethics human research.

📅 Date: March 20, 2024
🕛 Time: 6 PM EST
📍 In Person Location: Bioengineering Building, Room 201; 68 President St.
💻 Virtual Location: Zoom
⏰ Register by end of day March 18th

The 2024 Waring Lecture will be a hybrid event. The in person event will include a reception after the lecture. Both the virtual and in person components are free and open to the public. Registration is required for both formats.

About Sydney Halpern: Sydney Halpern is Professor Emerita at University of Illinois at Chicago, and Lecturer at the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University. She earned her doctorate in historical sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and has written extensively about twentieth-century American medical institutions and science. Her most recent focus has been moral issues in human experimentation. In addition to Dangerous Medicine, her books include Lesser Harms: The Morality of Risk in Medical Research (University of Chicago Press, 2004), winner of the Viseltear Outstanding Book Award from the American Public Health Association. Halpern is the recipient of multiyear grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (for Lesser Harms) and the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (for Dangerous Medicine). 

About the Joseph I. Waring Lecture: The Waring Library Society sponsors this annual lecture as part of the Waring Library Society Lecture series. The Waring Lecture is named in memory of Dr. Joseph I. Waring, a local pediatrician and medical historian, who became the first director of the medical history collections of the University.