Reading When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects by Adriana Petryana, I am faced with a variety of conflicting feelings about the nature of clinical travels abroad. There's an ethical aspect, an aspect of the necessity to research and develop, the aspect of colonial-eque actions, the aspect of providing health care, and so much more. I remember learning about studies that outsource their experiments to different countries last semester during my Introduction to Global Health class. It was presented to us in this same problematic-but-also-questionably-necessary dichotomy. Of course, we need to be able to test the medicines being researched. But there has to be some way that certain populations are not put at risk because they are exploited by this kind of research.
What comes to mind when I think of research testing, I think of the summer where I shadowed laboratory veterinarians at the University of Illinois. This meant that when the science experiments weren't happening, we went in and took care of the lab animals that the projects were testing on--mostly mice, some rats, one group of opossums, and some cats. The secretive nature of caring for the animals was interesting, too. They didn't want people to know where the labs that held the animals were incase people would try to break in and free the animals, so this meant all the labs with animals were in the basement and we got there through a bunch of underground tunnels throughout the campus.
When I first saw the lab conditions and the state some of mice were in, it struck me as cruel. The mice's autonomy was completely stripped from them and they were total science experiments being used for their biologies. An ethical dilemma was in my mind everyday--this kind of experimenting needs to happen to produce different kinds of technologies and medicines, but at the same time, it completely ruins the lives of a group of (many) mice. To me, it seems problematic to take these practices and place them on humans, especially when for humans, it arguably has more stresses than on mice (but that may be my own opinion where I value humans more than mice). For humans, their health affected or unaffected by these experiments will last them their whole lives. Their reason for being a part of these experiments are problematic and straddle the line of advantage-taking. Furthermore, conducting these experiments in a variety of countries messes with the infrastructure and proper healthcare delivery and imposes an idea of colonialism.
I haven't been able to make clear all the connections and differences between the lab mice and these people that are experimented on. In a way, they are very similar, and they are treated that way. But in a way they are very different, which makes it problematic that they can be treated in a similar manner.
What comes to mind when I think of research testing, I think of the summer where I shadowed laboratory veterinarians at the University of Illinois. This meant that when the science experiments weren't happening, we went in and took care of the lab animals that the projects were testing on--mostly mice, some rats, one group of opossums, and some cats. The secretive nature of caring for the animals was interesting, too. They didn't want people to know where the labs that held the animals were incase people would try to break in and free the animals, so this meant all the labs with animals were in the basement and we got there through a bunch of underground tunnels throughout the campus.
When I first saw the lab conditions and the state some of mice were in, it struck me as cruel. The mice's autonomy was completely stripped from them and they were total science experiments being used for their biologies. An ethical dilemma was in my mind everyday--this kind of experimenting needs to happen to produce different kinds of technologies and medicines, but at the same time, it completely ruins the lives of a group of (many) mice. To me, it seems problematic to take these practices and place them on humans, especially when for humans, it arguably has more stresses than on mice (but that may be my own opinion where I value humans more than mice). For humans, their health affected or unaffected by these experiments will last them their whole lives. Their reason for being a part of these experiments are problematic and straddle the line of advantage-taking. Furthermore, conducting these experiments in a variety of countries messes with the infrastructure and proper healthcare delivery and imposes an idea of colonialism.
I haven't been able to make clear all the connections and differences between the lab mice and these people that are experimented on. In a way, they are very similar, and they are treated that way. But in a way they are very different, which makes it problematic that they can be treated in a similar manner.
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