Always Playing Chess
Allies are sometimes regular flies
I am very happy I was asked to be part of this podcast. I am pretty proud of the team that does this work and the finished product of our conversation.
However, Johns Hopkins is a compromised institution. Not only is it infamous for stories like the Tuskegee (Muscogee word for warrior - taskeke) syphilis study done on African Americans, which was moved to Guatemala and involved Indigenous populations and mestizos of high Indigenous ancestry (much like several tuberculosis experiments), the Henrietta Lacks cancer/cell culture story (for which the family won millions of dollars), using blood samples from African American kids without consent (1969), purposely exposing African American kids to lead to track the effects, several concerns about unconsented or improperly consented research with American Indians, Alaska and Hawaiian Natives and a legal prohibition against research in 2001 after several lapses in its Institutional Review Board and Human Subjects safety processeses.
I am at Hopkins and I have taken their Human Subject protection training and have found it to be 1000 times better than the 5 other universities that I have been associated with. Currently IDARE and other campus groups (faculty and students) have done tremendous work trying to force Hopkins to get employees and students to take short courses in the history of racism, research misconduct, sexual harassment and other forms of social abuse. So I applaud them for all their efforts.
But Hopkins seems to be divided, as many Ivy League schools suffer from, between the employees and students vs the Dept Directors, Deans and alumni. So as much as I like to think that I am heard through this podcast and other significant pathways to Johns Hopkins input on their daily practice, I know that there is a powerful contingent who still want to exploit and profit from data and scientific research. I know specifically of a young, bright Irish American who has come up with two pharma therapies and has had his intellectual property stripped from him. IF white settlers can do that to another white settler, what chance to the black and the brown have. Please Ivy League, clean your houses now.