What if saying sorry isn’t enough? This episode urges us to think more deeply about wrongdoing, silence, complicity and solidarity in bioethics. Vanessa and Jantina reflect on the power—and limits—of an apology, including Vanessa’s experience of chairing the Committee that secured redressal from the White House for Public Health Department's infamous study on Syphilis at Tuskegee.

Vanessa Northington Gamble is a University Professor of Medical Humanities at the George Washington University, USA. She is the first woman and first African American to hold this prestigious, endowed faculty position.

Jantina de Vries is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where she also founded the Ethics Lab to centre Africa as the context and driver of bioethics in scholarship.

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This podcast is funded by Wellcome.

Complete show notes + transcript

ALSO CHECK OUT

1. Vanessa Northington Gamble’s website
2. Jantina de Vries’ publications
3. The history of the hospital at Tuskegee by NPR
4. The Syphilis Study was brought to public light with this, this, this and this article by the New York Times (1972)
5. Ethics Lab at the University of Cape Town
6. Archival footage of President Clinton apologising for the US Public Health Service’s study on Syphilis in Tuskegee. At the White House, 1997.
7. Vanessa led a Committee to demand redressal for the US Public Health Service’s study on Syphilis. Here is their final report from 1996.
8. Archival footage of the March over Edmund Pettus Bridge (1965)
9. Selma to Montgomery March
10. Solidarity Now by Mie Inoye, and Jodi Dean’s response to it.