Read highlights from our interview with Dr. Leiter below, and find the full conversation here.

What drew you to sociology initially, If I might ask?

I was a sociology major in college and I took a class on social problems in my first semester where we read a book about working poor families. I myself grew up working poor, and I found myself thinking “Oh, these are the people who actually care about people like me and my family, what is this?” So I just took more and more classes and then ended up getting a bachelor's and then a master's degree in sociology, and then went for a joint Phd. In sociology and social policy. So I've been a sociologist for a really long time at this point.

In your youth, let’s say, were you interested in the way people interacted with one another to some degree? Has this always been an orientation of yours?

Yes. I grew up poor, but we often lived in more affluent areas. So I was more aware of social stratification [on account of this]. In high school we were living in a trailer park and all the other students in my honors program tended to live on the nice side of town. We had a motel in front of the trailer park we lived in, and the motel was where a lot of sex workers worked, and I remember seeing clients coming in and out while I was waiting for the school bus and coming back home. That had a way of making me more aware of society as a 15 year old. So sociology to me became the place where people actually pay very close attention to how people’s life opportunities are shaped. 

As I was prepping for our interview, I noticed you had used the term “medical sociology,” which I thought was interesting- maybe we could start by talking about what this term or idea tends to encompass?

Sure! Sociologists are interested in the social world. I see sociology as being a combination of social structures and culture. I think this construct applies to health very directly and very nicely. [In my career] I've done a range of work; I've looked at youth with disabilities and their experiences transitioning to adulthood, I've looked at direct-to-consumer advertising for pharmaceuticals, I've looked at the FDA's regulation of women's health medical devices. I'm currently doing a book project, interviewing people about what it's like to live with permanently implanted medical devices in their bodies which are there for health reasons. For all of these subjects, policies are social structures. It's like a lever that we can pull to change people's lives, to change their opportunities, to change their access to things. And then, I'm really interested micro/macro connections. Okay, we have our policies, how does that trickle down to the lived experiences of people at the individual level? And what meaning do people attach to those experiences? So that's what I really focus on.

You’d mentioned  researching pharmaceuticals; our last interview was with Alan Rossi Silva, PhD, where we discussed the territory of intellectual property and patents in the medical realm. I'd be curious to hear what you found, or what was sociologically interesting about it to you in that area.

One of the papers I wrote is about a drug called thalidomide, which in the fifties was associated with really horrible birth defects.  It was prescribed to women for nausea early on in pregnancy, however that's the developmental period when limb formation is happening. And so babies that were exposed to Thalidomide in utero were born with flippers instead of arms. It was really awful. The U.S. never approved the drug, due to the activities of a couple of women who did the research, and someone who worked in the FDA who kept delaying the drug’s approval. It was however used in other countries. But then in the nineties, they were trying again to get approval for thalidomide in the US, because it turns out it's really helpful for a particular form of leprosy and for AIDS wasting syndrome. It can really help people with those conditions. You can see how those are pretty important things to treat. The FDA had to decide, “well, if we were going to approve this, how are we going to make sure that no babies are exposed to thalidomide?” So I co-wrote a paper with a medical sociology faculty member at Brandeis about the topic. I also have another paper about direct consumer pharmaceutical advertising which I co-wrote with a different faculty member at Brandeis, where we really look at how drug companies have these campaigns where they're essentially selling sickness. The advertisers convince people they have a condition, and then they have to go ask their doctor for the drug to treat it. Those are the 2 pieces about pharmaceuticals that I've done.