Professor Elliott was originally trained in medicine before going into philosophy. His most recent book, The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No, is about whistleblowing in medical research. I am currently working on a book about degradation and indignity.

Much of Prof Elliott’s recent scholarship has been in two areas. The first area concerns wrongdoing in medicine, especially in the areas of clinical research and pharmaceutical marketing. The second concerns philosophical issues surrounding identity, authenticity and justice as seen through the lens of biomedical technology. He also has longstanding interests in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and the novelist Walker Percy. 

Prof Elliott has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, a resident fellowship at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy, the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History in the Kluge Center of the U.S. Library of Congress and a Weatherhead Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. His work has also been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health. In addition to his papers in academic journals, Prof Elliott has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The American Scholar, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. In 2003-04 he was invited to lead a year-long bioethics seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.