Harriet A. Washington is a medical ethicist, editor, and writer whose books include Renaissance men: Agents of Medical and Cultural Modernity, A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and the American Mind and Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Her numerous awards include a National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Oakland Award, The American Medical Writers Association Walter Alvarez Award and the American Library Association Black Caucus Nonfiction Award.
Washington is co-chair of the History and Public Health section of the New York Academy of Medicine, and studies history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. She lectures in bioethics at Columbia University, where she delivered the 2020 commencement speech to Columbia’s School of Public Health and won Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health’s Public Health Leadership Award as well as its 2020-21 Kenneth and Mamie Clark Distinguished Lecture Award.
She has held research and writing fellowships in medical ethics at Harvard Medical School, at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, at Stanford University and at the University of Nevada’s Black Mountain Institute. She has been a visiting scholar at DePaul University College of Law and a senior research scholar at the National Center for Bioethics at Tuskegee University. Washington curates a series of feature medical films and has worked as a classical-music announcer for public radio.