Dan Markingson’s mother was worried about him. Her son, seriously struggling with mental illness, had enrolled in an AstraZeneca drug trial at the University of Minnesota. Over the next few months, his condition appeared to deteriorate, even as his mother Mary Weiss begged to get him out of the trial. “Do we have to wait until he kills himself or anyone else before anyone does anything?” she asked in a voicemail to the study coordinator. Three weeks later, in April of 2003, he cut his throat.
Looking back on the tragedy now, author Carl Elliott says, “I still have yet to find anybody who wants to defend it.” But for a long time, it didn’t seem like anybody wanted to do anything about it either. And as a faculty member at the university, Elliott quickly found himself frustrated and, as he writes in his new book, “The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No,” “rattled.” He started digging around, and in 2010 published a feature in Mother Jones, explosively titled “The Deadly Corruption of Clinical Trials.”
