During that time, she and Jean (née Cole) Harris (1926–2015)[2] investigated and publicized the 1962 Boston Strangler assaults and murders.
McLaughlin later went on to work as a science writer for Harvard University, and as executive director of public relations at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Boston, where she led a capital campaign to build its primary facility.
After she joined the Editorial Page staff in 1992, McLaughlin was critical of elected officials, such as US Senator Jesse Helms, for politicizing the disease, writing in the Globe in 1995: Helms is invincibly ignorant about AIDS, a complicated matter that is not suited to moralistic pandering... he can't even tell the difference between his blind prejudice and a slow but world-encompassing plague.
The work was praised in JAMA as "an expression of the synthesis of science and humanism at its best", but panned by reviewer Barbara Ehrenreich in The New York Times as being almost wholly uncritical of the dubious ethics of many of the research studies that led to the development of the drug.
[5][6] The Loretta McLaughlin research and publication records collection is held at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University.
[7] In 1988, The New England Journal of Public Policy published McLaughlin's article "AIDS: An Overview", which was strongly critical of the federal government's response to the epidemic.