Colonial Experimentality

There are a lot of things going on in “When Experiments Travel,” but I’m just going to focus on a few. First, Petryna’s work shows us a new form of colonialism in which humans are reduced to data and that data is then accumulated. At the same time, those people are humans and they benefit from trials, sometimes as the only means of healthcare services or income. From my outside perspective, it is a painful and awkward relationship in which corporations give people what they desperately need under the condition that those human lives remain viable resources of information (that can be translated into profit). This process demands the production of a new type of being – the trial participant – who is assumed to be rational in their decision-making and for whom choice is assumed to be informed. All of this rests on a notion of “naïveté”: purity, innocence, virginity, sterility, previously untouched-ness; these test populations are sought out specifically because they are poor and lack access to other drugs, but the concept of naïveté assumes little or no drug interaction with other kinds of local pharmacological compounds, which implicitly demotes local forms of medicine to being epistemologically inferior. Simultaneously, it converts idealized trial participants – passive, consenting, docile, rational, and pure – into a sort of natural resource that can be exported (in a way) similarly to oil or agriculture, thereby incentivizing the nation-state to continue its decentralized, neoliberal form of healthcare management because as far as they are concerned, they provide a resource for pharmaceutical companies to harvest, and the harvest is at the same time a service that the nation state does not have to provide.