'Whistleblowers are the exception, not the rule'

A couple of days ago I had a fantastic conversation with Carl Elliott, the author of June's Curious Reading Club pick, about the morals and motives of medical whistleblowers, the complex lives they live, and the way accountability works… or doesn’t.

Among the insights he shared with us: how rare it actually is for there to be a whistleblower.

"There are way, way more research scandals out there that had no whistleblowers," he told club members in our live Q&A. Most scandals are exposed by victims or the media, not by people who are closer to the problem.

"There are tons of people on the inside who know that the research subjects are being mistreated or abused or lied to, and they just don't do anything at all about it. I mean, they just watch it for years, and sometimes for decades, as the deaths pile up. That was one surprise: whistleblowers are really the exception, not the rule."

Perhaps it not a shock that Carl started out thinking otherwise, given that he comes to it all as a whistleblower himself. After reading about a medical research scandal at his own institution, the University of Minnesota, in the early 2000s, he wrote about it very publicly and worked tirelessly to get the issue looked at by an independent authority. It took years and was, he says, a qualified success at best.

After publishing in the national media about it, "I and some other people on campus spent the next, I guess, five years advocating for that kind of outside investigation, to no avail,” he explains. “But when a second victim of research abuse came forward, and a former governor of Minnesota got involved, the legislature asked the watchdog agency that we have here in Minnesota to get involved... and they did."

"It came out with a very satisfying and accurate response, a very scathing report about the way the University of Minnesota had handled this. And so it felt as if we had gotten what we were looking for. But nothing really happened. No compensation, no sanctions for the researchers, really nothing. I mean, they suspended psychiatric drug trials for a while, but that was really about it. And so then the question is like, OK, what do you do now? Because it didn't really feel like any justice had been done."

And that, then, was the genesis for this book.

"The whole reason for writing it was to kind of dig myself out of the hole that I found myself in," he says. "And so I started looking at these other cases that seemed to have some similarity as a way of trying to figure out what the threads might be, and what I could have done better."

I was surprised when he told us that his personal take, which feels so integral to the book, wasn't actually part of his original vision when writing it: that it started by looking at the different whistleblowers through a more detached lens. But he does think that it was important for the people he interviewed to be able to discuss their experiences with somebody who had been through a version of it too.

"Most reporters are not terribly interested in the psychology of the whistleblower, they're mainly interested in the scandal that they're trying to expose," he says. "And with all of the people I've talked to, that's in the past... the facts are relatively clear. So the thing that I was interested in is what was it? What did you try? How did your friends treat you? I basically tried to understand what story they tell themselves about this, because that's the main struggle that people have: unlike a movie or a book, there is no obvious beginning, middle and end, and there's no obvious moral to the story."

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Another thing that struck me in The Occasional Human Sacrifice was how important the mainstream media was—even now, in an age of social media—in breaking open these big scandals. While platforms like Twitter or TikTok or Instagram dominate our attention, they have not been part of blowing these stories up... instead, more traditional news headlines and video documentaries still seem an incredibly important part of making these stories reach wider audiences. So what does that mean in an increasingly fragmented media ecosystem, where facts are under fire and trust is at an all-time low?

"Even with the [traditional] media it was difficult to get the attention of a reporter, because after a while if it's not news any more, news reporters are not going to report it. And it's rare for an investigative reporter to start digging into a story that's already been investigated."

"There are a lot of people who have people approached me, and approached me back then, with the idea that it's somehow easier, in the era of social media, to expose things and hold people to account… and I just can't see it. At least in my very small area of whistleblowing and medical research, I've never seen a scandal uncovered as a result of somebody posting about it on Twitter, or Facebook, or Instagram, or something like this."

We covered a lot of ground in the rest of our conversation, everything from caste and honor to institutional memory (or the lack of it) to Richard Nixon and Geraldo Rivera—both of whom make perhaps unexpected appearances in the book. Carl, as is apparent from his writing, has a fascination with Nixon. (More on that soon.)

We also took the time to get a few reading recommendations from him, which I am certainly going to add to my own stack.

A book that helped shape his own work: "The one I had in the back of my head when I was writing this one is a book called Beautiful Souls [by Eyal Press]. It's basically character portraits of people who have unexpectedly found themselves in a situation where they had a choice whether or not to behave heroically or not, and chose the right thing. He's a terrific writer. He's got a book that I think is even better out now that I would recommend to people, called Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America, which is about the people who do these sorts of jobs that we think of as unsavory but need to be done—like prison guards and drone operators. He goes out and interviews them and talks to them about their inner lives, their moral struggles. It's just a fantastic book."

And a stone cold classic: "The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. It's my favorite book. I teach it, I read it, it never gets old. It has nothing to do with whistleblowing, it's a kind of philosophical, existential novel. But very funny, very dark. My kind of book."

Lots to get stuck into there.

Thanks to Carl, and to the club members who turned up for our session. The complete video of our conversation is available for members on YouTube: if you want to get access to these videos each month, they are there for anyone who joins the club on a monthly or annual basis.

Over the next couple of weeks I plan on sharing some more recommendations, and a conversation with another great science writer—before we turn our attention to July’s pick.

Thanks

Bobbie