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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.
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