Barbara Seaman, an author, and patients’ rights advocate who was one of the first people to bring women’s reproductive health to wide public attention. She was an energizing influence on hundreds of younger writers and organizers for nearly half a century. Barbara Seaman persistently challenged the medical establishment and pharmaceutical companies by exposing their drive…
John Pesando MD, PhD, an oncologist, did what few doctors have the courage to do; which is to blow the whistle on wrongdoing at his own medical center. Dr. Pesando risked his career by sounding the alarm over Protocol 126, a dangerous, unethical human experiment at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “What…
Maurice Henry Pappworth, MD, (1910–1994) was, by any standard, a controversial figure. “A life-long outsider he chose an unconventional career path as a private medical tutor rather than accept anything less than his first job choice — a consultant post in a London teaching hospital.” By all accounts he was rejected because he was a Jew who…
Nancy Olivieri, MD is widely recognized as one of the preeminent crusaders for research integrity, best interest of patient, academic freedom and as a critic of the ever-expanding corporate influence at universities. She has demonstrated great courage — at great sacrifice — when she acted in accordance with the physician’s foremost moral obligation to protect…
Florence Nightingale was one of the most influential women in 19th century England; a brilliant medical analyst and organizer, a reformer who championed the use of statistics for evaluating the practice of medicine. After the Crimean War (1853–1856) where she witnessed how thousands of British soldiers died from infections, Nightingale visited almost every hospital in Europe, analyzed…
Herbert Needleman, MD, A pediatrician and child psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Dr. Needleman is distinguished as a researcher who, having determined the developmental implications of excessive exposure to lead, has worked tirelessly and at great personal cost to force governments and industry to confront the implications of his findings. While this…
Loren Mosher, MD, a psychiatrist who espoused drug-free treatment for schizophrenia. He was a graduate of Stanford and Harvard Medical School. He served as the first chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia of the National Institutes of Mental Health from 1968 to 1980. He was the founder and first Editor in Chief of Schizophrenia…
John Anthony Morris, MD, a bacteriologist and virologist who trained at Walter Reed Hospital. He had a distinguished career researching viral and respiratory diseases at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1940s to 1976. In the mid-1950s NIH assigned him to investigating vaccines and their risk factors, and in 1959, Dr. Morris was recruited…
Tom Koch PhD, is among the best known, most prolific writers you’ve probably never heard about. An ethicist, writer, and researcher specializing in the care of the fragile, he holds a multi-disciplinary PhD (medicine, ethics/philosophy, geography) from the University of British Columbia. In Toronto he serves as a medical ethicist and consultant specializing in issues…
Frances Oldham Kelsey MD, PhD, has earned her place as “America’s Greatest Living Heroine” — she turned 100 on July 24, 2014. Dr. Kelsey was the medical pharmacologist at the FDA who refused to license thalidomide for the U.S. market despite the enormous pressures put upon her by a pharmaceutical company. Her determination not to license…
An eminent scholar, a professor of law and ethics at Yale Law School who spent more than 50 years tackling confounding questions on the boundaries between law, medicine, psychology and ethics. An inspirational teacher and mentor not only to his law students at Yale, but, as one of his distinguished students and colleagues, Alexander Capron,…
Bernadine Healy, MD, a cardiologist, was the first woman Director of the National Institutes of Health (1991–1993); Dean of Ohio State University College of Medicine (1995–1999); President of the American Heart Association (1998–1999); Deputy Director of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Techonology; Chair of the Research Institute at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation…
