In When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects, Petryna provides a nuanced, human-oriented study of global clinical trials, which can be seen as a scientific innovation that reduces risk and promotes human right on the one hand, or a structural violence that only benefits the developed countries at the cost of putting people at the downstream at risk. She reaches out to scientists, global companies, bureaucrats, and the grassroots society, and interrogates the value systems of both researchers and patients who participate in trials. In Chapter One, she continues her previous study of biological citizenship and comes up with the notion of experimentality, which “transcends any artificial separation between the controlled conditions of testing (the “lab”) and the public (the “field”)”, focusing on people who are both victims and beneficiaries of the trails and countries that welcome and even rely on these trails. In chapter two, in the case of CRO, she shows the selectiveness hidden in the trails that claims safety and ethnics, while the effort of separating research from political and social contexts seems a mission impossible. In Chapter Three, via sites like Poland, she discusses the meaning of vulnerability which exists in everyday ethical and legal decisions that can put patients in a totally disadvantageous place. In Chapter Four, the aftermath of trails in Brazil, which puts experts of global health in an economical puzzle. Petryna holds a positive tone in the end, after showing some alternative approaches that reveal the “plasticity” in experiment in different forms and help to connect scientific research and public health.
The global trials arise at the same context like surrogacy and global organ trade, but the clinical trials, managed by experts and transnational companies, can easily frame their agenda as beneficent and get support from nation-state leaders. The global clinical trials, indeed, benefit the healthcare, if we do not view the healthcare as a basic worldwide human right.
No comments:
Post a Comment