The UF Honors Program will host award-winning medical journalist and author Harriet A. Washington at 7:30 p.m. Monday in the Reitz Union Rion Ballroom.
Washington wrote the critically appraised book "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present," a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
The lecture will focus on the ethical questions around medical research, according to UF Honors Program Director Kevin Knudson.
The presentation further expands on the topic of medical ethics discussed in the Honors Program Common Reading book "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," which was assigned to incoming Honors students.
The book, written by Rebecca Skloot, chronicles the story of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman whose cells were taken without permission and later used to develop vaccines and other important medical applications.
"We were thinking about other ways to talk about [medical ethics] since a lot of our students in the Honors Program and at UF are pre-med," Knudson said.
