Urban Health Institute Launches Symposia on Race,
Research in U.S.
Harriet Washington
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On Monday, Feb. 2, the Johns Hopkins
Urban Health Institute is hosting "American Apartheid:
Race, Fact and Myth in U.S. Medical Research," the first in
a series of symposia exploring the role of
race and research in America. Leading the event is Harriet
Washington, bioethics journalist and
author of the award-winning book Medical Apartheid: The
Dark History of Medical Experimentation on
Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.
Washington will chronicle her exploration into the
history of medical experimentation in black America and
discuss origins of racial health disparities.
Medical Apartheid received the 2007 Nonfiction
Award from the Black Caucus of the American
Library Association and was named one of the year's best
books by Publishers' Weekly. Washington
has worked as a journalist and editor for USA Today
and has been a fellow in ethics at the Harvard
Medical School, a fellow at the Harvard School of Public
Health and a Knight Fellow at Stanford
University.
Washington's presentation will be followed by
commentary from a panel of three invited guests
and conclude with questions and reaction from the audience.
The panelists are Thomas A. LaVeist,
director of the Hopkins Center for Health Disparities
Solutions; Neil Powe, director of the
Welch Center for Prevention, Epidemiology and Clinical
Research at Johns Hopkins; and David Lacks, son of
Henrietta Lacks, a cervical cancer patient in the early
1950s at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, where
cells taken from her tumor (called "HeLa") led to a
breakthrough in cell research and have been used
for research into cancer, AIDS, the effects of radiation
and more. Henrietta Lacks' family was
unaware that her cells had been used for research until
1975, after the death of one of the head
researchers.
The goal of the Urban Health Institute's Race and
Research series is to confront the distrust
and skepticism toward biomedical research that exists
within the black community and to engage
Johns Hopkins researchers in conversations with the
community to discuss what is needed to move
forward.
The symposium will begin at 4:30 p.m. in Sommer Hall
at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health. For more information, contact Ebony Pittman
at the Urban Health Institute, 410-502-6155 or
epittman@jhsph.edu.
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2009
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