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Carl Elliott

Carl Elliott is a Professor at the University of Minnesota and the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. He is working on a book about whistleblowers and unethical medical research.
 (February 2019)

IN THE REVIEW

Happiness on Demand?

Jacques Fabien Gautier-Dagoty: Anatomy of the Brain, eighteenth century

The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor

by Lone Frank
Twelve years ago, a fifty-nine-year-old Dutchman checked into an Amsterdam hospital to have two small electrodes implanted in his brain. The patient, “Mr. B,” had a forty-year history of severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. Neither drugs nor therapy had helped, and he was prepared to try an experimental treatment called deep brain …

Knifed with a Smile

The Experiments

a three-part documentary film series directed by Bosse Lindquist
Few medical research scandals are as spectacular as Paolo Macchiarini’s. Five years ago he was a celebrity surgeon at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, one of Europe’s premier medical centers, which awards the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Macchiarini was implanting the world’s first artificial tracheas into patients—and by his account, doing it with great success. But soon there were murmurs about his methods. His patients appeared to be dying.