S9E1: Nicholas Freudenberg
Nicholas Freudenberg is Distinguished Professor of Public Health Emeritus at the CUNY School of Public Health. Freudenberg has written about corprorate influences on health since 2008 and is the author of Lethal but Legal Corporations, Consumption and Protecting Public Health (Oxford University Press, 2014), At What Cost Modern Capitalism and the Future of Health (Oxford University Press, 2021), and the forthcoming Fighting for New York Health and Social Justice Activism since the 1960s (Columbia University Press, September 2026). Freudenberg is a member of the Editorial Advisory Group for the World Health Organization’s Report on the Global Status of Commercial Determinants of Health, due to be released in 2026, and a co-author of the 2023 Lancet series on commercial determinants of health. At CUNY, Freudenberg has served as founder and director of the Hunter College Center on AIDS, Drugs and Community Health, CUNY CARES (Comprehensive Access to Essential Resources and Services), the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, Health LINK , a reentry program for people leaving Rikers Island to return to their communities, and the CUNY School of Public Health doctoral program.
S9E2: Daphne Martschenko and Sam Trejo
In this episode, our previous guest Dr. Daphne Martschenko returns with her co-author Dr. Sam Trejo to discuss their new book What We Inherit: How New Technologies and Old Myths Are Shaping Our Genomic Future.
Dr. Martschenko, who earned her PhD at Cambridge, was studying how genomic scientists understood their motivations, responsibilities, and the risks of their work. More skeptical of the field’s claims and concerned about premature industry applications, she, like Dr. Trejo, was frustrated by polarized academic debates in which opposing sides rarely engaged productively. Their shared desire for more constructive dialogue shaped their collaboration and ultimately their book. In this work, they discovered more common ground than expected. Although disagreements remained, that didn’t hinder their ability to think together about regulatory frameworks that should be in place.
They highlight two myths that distort public understanding of genomics:
• The Destiny Myth—the belief that genes unilaterally determine life outcomes, historically used to justify harms such as involuntary sterilization.
• The Race Myth—the false idea that humanity is divided into discrete biological races whose genetic differences explain behavioral or social outcomes, a misconception that has fueled discriminatory policies and continues to underlie white supremacist ideologies.
Their work aims to help the public interpret genomic data and understand both its promise and limits. They note that polygenic scores remain a “black box”: even when predictive in certain contexts, their biological pathways are unclear and may operate differently across environments. Their remaining differences center on how scientific advances might counter—or inadvertently reinforce—social harms, and where scientific effort should be focused to meaningfully reduce health disparities.
Find their book here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691237756/what-we-inherit?srsltid=AfmBOoppBsKJ5iKykfO2MzqGseQw_3EF028_8tMTrAB9G0trgMdqIUSe
Other joint publications: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35047864/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37695009/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34493865/
In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Katherine Peeler, founding director of the Peeler Immigration Lab, to discuss her longstanding empirical work on human rights and US immigration systems. Dr. Peeler is an Associate Physician in Pediatrics at the Boston Children’s Hospital and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. She is a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. Dr. Peeler describes her longstanding interest in building an evidence base of health effects of human rights abuses as a means of changing policy. Her interest in this field was initially sparked by the work of Paul Farmer and Partners in Health and their mission to improve direct care to patients. She was drawn specifically to challenges facing asylum seekers in the US and shifted towards policy work with Physicians for Human Rights. She founded the Peeler Lab during the COVID pandemic out of concern for people facing the pandemic in detention. Her lab has focused on writing for a public and policy audience to improve conditions and health of immigrants. More recently, her work has focused on solitary confinement in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities. She painstakingly documents the multiple human rights violations, record number of deaths in these facilities, and violations of United Nations (UN) minimal standards for treatment of detained individuals. Policies for solitary confinement or “restricted housing” meet UN criteria for torture. She outlines strategies that States and local governments can employ to improve oversight and limit expansion of these facilities. The episode wraps up with a discussion of the role of bioethicists to forge common language across opposition and help parties understand shared values and have more productive conversations.
Peeler Lab: https://peelerimmigrationlab.hsites.harvard.edu/
Publications:
Cruelty Campaign: Solitary Confinement in US Immigration Detention
S9E4: Kadija Ferryman
For this episode, we are joined by Kadija Ferryman, an anthropologist who studies equity and policy in health risk prediction technologies. Dr. Ferryman is Faculty at the Berman Institute of Bioethics and Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Dr. Ferryman traces her path into studying technology through a cultural anthropology lens, beginning with an early curiosity about how different cultures define illness and disease. She explains how the cultural anthropology focus on beliefs, values, and power structures shapes the way she examines modern health technologies. Using examples like the sequencing of the human genome, she highlights how different scientific communities drew strikingly different conclusions from the same discovery, revealing deeper tensions about race, biology, and social meaning that continue to influence biomedical research.
Building on this foundation, Dr. Ferryman explores how bias becomes embedded in everyday health technologies, from pulse oximeters to clinical risk prediction algorithms. She describes how known inaccuracies of pulse oximeter readings for darker-skinned individuals persisted for decades and became especially visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. Extending these concerns to emerging areas like generative AI, she raises important questions about how biased data can shape both clinical care and healthcare systems more broadly. At the same time, she offers a more nuanced perspective: these flawed technologies can also serve as powerful windows into the inequities of our society and as opportunities to rethink how ethics is integrated into medicine and technological development.
Ferryman K, Mackintosh M, Ghassemi M. Considering Biased Data as Informative Artifacts in AI-Assisted Health Care. N Engl J Med. 2023 Aug 31;389(9):833-838.
Ethical Guidelines for AI:
https://healthaipartnership.org/health-equity-across-the-ai-lifecycle-heaal
Select other publications by Dr. Ferryman:
Collins BX, Bélisle-Pipon JC, Evans BJ, Ferryman K, Jiang X, Nebeker C, Novak L, Roberts K, Were M, Yin Z, Ravitsky V, Coco J, Hendricks-Sturrup R, Williams I, Clayton EW, Malin BA; Bridge2AI Ethics and Trustworthy AI Working Group. Addressing ethical issues in healthcare artificial intelligence using a lifecycle-informed process. JAMIA Open. 2024 Nov 15;7(4):ooae108.
Shachar C, Drabo EF, Iwashyna TJ, Ferryman K. Addressing Racial and Ethnic Bias in Pulse Oximeters-A Wicked Problem. JAMA. 2025 Feb 18;333(7):563-564.
Ferryman K, Crews DC, Drabo EF, Iwashyna TJ, Kane O, Jackson JW. Adherence to FDA Guidance on Pulse Oximetry Testing Among Diverse Individuals, 1996-2024. JAMA. 2025 Feb 18;333(7):631-632
Also mentioned on the show: Joy Buolamwini Coded Bias
S9E5: Elizabeth J. Chuang
In this episode, Dr. Chuang discusses some of her research, which has focused on racial disparities in health care delivery. She shares her journey to this topic starting with her childhood experiences as a witness to structural racism and implicit bias. She discusses how bias and structural inequities are reproduced in many ways, all affecting health and healthcare outcomes. Her work includes several focuses including interpersonal bias in healthcare communication with patients with serious illness and their families, bias in public health practices and bias in Artificial Intelligence. The discussion concludes with the ways that biomedical research has contributed to bias in healthcare over time. The discussion also includes some ways that researchers can move forward even in a challenging funding environment.
Chuang E, Hope AA, Allyn K, Szalkiewicz E, Gary B, Gong MN. Gaps in Provision of Primary and Specialty Palliative Care in the Acute Care Setting by Race and Ethnicity. J Pain Symptom Manage. 2017 Nov;54(5):645-653.e1.
Chuang E, Yu S, Georgia A, Nymeyer J, Williams J. A Decade of Studying Drivers of Disparities in End-of-Life Care for Black Americans: Using the NIMHD Framework for Health Disparities Research to Map the Path Ahead. J Pain Symptom Manage. 2022 Jul;64(1):e43-e52.
Chuang E, Grand-Clement J, Chen JT, Chan CW, Goyal V, Gong MN. Quantifying Utilitarian Outcomes to Inform Triage Ethics: Simulated Performance of a Ventilator Triage Protocol under Sars-CoV-2 Pandemic Surge Conditions. AJOB Empir Bioeth. 2022 Jul-Sep;13(3):196-204.
Binkley CE, Dellavalle NS, Chuang E. From Mitigation to Flourishing: We Must Harness Emerging Technologies to Improve Health of the Most Vulnerable. Am J Bioeth. 2026 Feb;26(2):127-129.
Cited in this episode:
Barnato AE, Berhane Z, Weissfeld LA, Chang CC, Linde-Zwirble WT, Angus DC; Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ICU End-of-Life Peer Group. Racial variation in end-of-life intensive care use: a race or hospital effect? Health Serv Res. 2006 Dec;41(6):2219-37.
Johnson KS, Kuchibhatla M, Payne R, Tulsky JA. Race and residence: intercounty variation in black-white differences in hospice use. J Pain Symptom Manage. 2013 Nov;46(5):681-90. doi: 10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2012.12.006. Epub 2013 Mar 21.
Ashana DC, Welsh W, Preiss D, Sperling J, You H, Tu K, Carson SS, Hough C, White DB, Kerlin M, Docherty S, Johnson KS, Cox CE. Racial Differences in Shared Decision-Making About Critical Illness. JAMA Intern Med. 2024 Apr 1;184(4):424-432.
Dellavalle NS, Ellis JR, Moore AA, Akerson M, Andazola M, Campbell EG, DeCamp M. What patients want from healthcare chatbots: insights from a mixed-methods study. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2025 Nov 1;32(11):1735-1745.
Bioethics in the Margins 