Laura Stark is a Stetten Fellow in the Office of NIH History for 2008-2009

Laura Stark works on the social history of morality, medicine, and the modern state. Stark received a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University in 2006, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Science in Human Culture at Northwestern University from 2006-2008. As a Stetten Fellow, Stark is writing a book manuscript on how rules for the treatment of “human subjects” were formalized in the United States between 1952 and 1974, and how these rules play out within Institution Review Boards today. The book project (tentatively titled Behind Closed Doors) will reconstruct the workaday life of scientists, lawyers, administrators, and research subjects working—and warring—inside the gates of NIH, where scientists and administrators first wrote rules for the treatment of human subjects as they prepared to open the revolutionary NIH Clinical Center building.

The book argues that the model of group deliberation that gradually crystallized during this period reflected contemporary legal, as well as medical, conceptions of what it meant to be human, what political rights human subjects deserved, and who was best suited to decide. Stark will also use her long-term observations and audio recordings of the meetings of three IRBs to explain how the historical contingencies that shaped rules for the treatment of human subjects in the postwar era guide decision-making today within hospitals, universities, health departments, and other institutions in the United States and across the globe.