Harriet A. Washington

Education Washington was born in Fort Dix, New Jersey. She graduated from the University of Rochester in 1976 with a B.A. in English literature and later completed an M.A. in journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Career Washington was Health and Science editor of the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. In 1990, she was awarded the New Horizons Traveling Fellowship by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. She subsequently worked as a Page One editor at USA Today, before winning a fellowship from the Harvard School of Public Health.

Washington's third book, Medical Apartheid, won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

Her 2019 book A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind explores how poor people of color disproportionately suffer from environmental disasters and exposure to environmental toxins, including lead, arsenic, mercury, and DDT. Exposure to these chemicals impairs brain development and can lead to lower IQ.

Washington was a visiting scholar at the DePaul University College of Law and was a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute of the University of Las Vegas at Nevada in 2012-2013.

Washington has been interviewed by NPR and Democracy Now!.

Personal life Washington lives in Manhattan.

Selected bibliography

Selected reviews Harriet reviews mostly on those subjects that she writes upon - human experimentation, especially deceptive ones, without taking informed consent. Her review of one of the most talked about books on this subject, The Plutonium Files, was published in The New England Journal of Medicine.