Grab your consent forms (but don’t sign them yet) and your government-issued fetal monitoring bracelet, because today we’re getting a broader understanding of what happens when people aren’t treated like people but like data, vessels, and experiments. The body keeps the score- even when it’s for medical horror stories.
From Adriana Smith, kept alive against her will to serve as a human incubator under Georgia’s abortion laws, to Henrietta Lacks, whose cells were stolen, immortalized, and monetized without her knowledge or family’s consent, this episode unpacks the long, horrifying legacy of unethical medical research in America.
We’ll walk through the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Holmesburg Prison experiments, the HIV-tainted blood scandal that infected kids like Ryan White, while the government spent more money on the Tylenol murders than AIDS research. And this isn’t ancient history, it’s happening today- not just with Adriana Smith, or Terri Schiavo as a human prop before her but with forced sterilizations, CRISPR babies, and what happens when “the greater good” doesn’t include you.
This isn’t an anti-science episode. I’m pro-science, but not when the most marganilzed among us have to die for it.
And in a world where women, people of color, and the poor are still being used, sometimes even after death- it’s more important than ever to ask:
Who gets to be a patient? And who’s just a test subject?
(Originally released May 2025)
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