Dr. Carl Elliott

And so I got in touch with Mary Weiss, Dan Markinson's mom.

She was not happy to hear from me, obviously.

She had a lot of suspicions of the university.

She agreed to talk to me, and then after we talked, she agreed to let me have access to everything I wanted, court records, medical records, Dan's diaries, anything that would be useful.

And so I wound up writing about it in a sort of larger backdrop to it, which was a sort of scandal about research integrity involving the sponsor of the study, AstraZeneca.

And eventually wrote about it in Mother Jones magazine, sort of hoping that having exposure in a national publication would shame the university into acting.

But that, again, was a complete failure.

I mean, it really accomplished nothing at all except to make the entire academic health center very angry with me.

Kurt Vonnegut described the man in the hole story as somebody gets into trouble and gets out again.

And he said, you know, we love this story.

The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy kills the Wicked Witch and returns to Kansas.

The prodigal son, Robinson Crusoe, David and Goliath.

The reason we like these stories is that they sort of reassure us that the world has a kind of moral sense to it, that the universe is a fair and just place.

And if you watch, you know, whistleblower movies or TV shows about whistleblowers, they usually follow some version of that men and all story.

The whistleblower takes down the corrupt organization.

What I found when I started looking deeper into these stories, actual whistleblower stories, is that they usually don't follow that sort of narrative arc.

I mean, they usually don't have happy endings.

And the whistleblowers themselves usually come out of the experience with these sort of very deep moral wounds.

It's almost as if it's a kind of existential disorientation because everything that they thought about how the world works is upended.

I mean, they just assume, everybody just assumes, if they've gotten to the point where they feel like there's nothing else to do, they assume that the rest of the world is going to be as morally outraged by what they have found and what they're trying to reveal as they were when they found it out.