Guideline for Blind Peer Review
- · Keep it confidential
- · Use the electronic manuscript review form
- · Email it to Dr. Song by Monday, March 13, 2017 (note the extended deadline)
- · Final version of paper is due Friday, March 24, 2017
Next Week’s Session on Ultrasound Technology
- · We will be going to SLU to have a hands-on experience with ultrasound technology
- · We will be meeting at Crave Coffee House at 9:30AM (see Dr. Song’s email regarding this)
Discussion: Globalizing Clinical Trials
- · Discussant: Jake Eaton
- · Experimentality: term at the heart of the book; knowledge is produced through multi-layered experiments; essence of an experiment (for humans to go out and acquire knowledge—acts as a justification)
o
Companies are profiting without giving anything
back to the participants
o
Colonial-esque relationship
o
This process creates a new subject: a trial-participant
subject (willing, docile, passive, consent-giving)
- · Who are “they”?: Western pharmaceutical companies partnering with native doctors to implement trials
o
Researchers working with the CRO’s (contract
research organizations)
§ Bureaucratic nature led to the creation of CRO’s and other aspects of modern day clinical trials
· Created in order to protect patients/subjects, but are they actually?
§
Redefining ethics in ways that will allow them
to continue experimentation
§
Tinkering with data and population to show the
effectiveness
·
Seeing data instead of patients
- · Paternalistic: term was used in many different cases throughout the book
o
Not employed properly in this context
o
Everyone knows it’s bad
- · Brazil
o
Grassroots movements of patient activists to
gain access to experimental drugs for HIV/AIDS
§
Universal healthcare system
§
A lot of spending in Brazil now goes to rare
pharmaceutical treatments due to the public’s demand
·
Patients can sue doctor for the right to the
treatment
·
Demand is generated through the companies offering
these trials
- · On Petryna
- How did she get access to these people? How did she establish rapport? Her explanation seems insufficient.
- Petryna argues that she is not anti-science yet her ethnography illustrates that science is not infallible, not just facts, not unbiased
- Science and technology are about generalizability but people are not generalizable
- Manipulation of data: artificially selecting things so that the data can say something that they want
- Patients lack of trust in clinical trials shows that people don’t trust science anymore
- Analogy: textbook is perceived as truth when you are in elementary school yet the knowledge inside of it is flushed out based on who wrote it
- Transnational surrogacy
- Paying poor people—justification was “at least they’re getting paid”
- Similar to the drug justification being used in clinical trials
- People are benefiting from the drugs that they would otherwise not have access to
- But what about after the clinical trials? Will they have access to the final drugs?
- Value of human life; can you put a price in it? Capitalistic in nature; how do we put a price on human life?
- Overarching institutional problems related to government (economy, health, etc.)
- · Mice research
o
Maya’s post
§
Dilemma—horrible conditions of mice yet need to
test medicine
§
Can these mice stand in for human experience?
o
Scientific language: use of specific words to
justify actions
§
“Sacrificing” mice for the greater good instead
of “killing”
o
Taking it (mice and drugs being tested) out of context and bringing it into the
lab for research
o We must acknowledge that this has brought a
lot of progress
o
Ethics about care—how is this process
incorporated into bureaucratic processes?
§
Claiming to be ethical while still doing it
§
Bureaucracy does not have the burden of
responsibility
o
When you distill people/mice to mere experimental subjects, it is harder to empathize
§
Forced disassociation; remove yourself from your
moral/ethics in order to do what you need to do
§
Ex. Physicians preferred to be distant in Petryna’s
book
o
Killing animals/mice: data can be different
based on the corporation in control/financially backing the experiments
- · Knowledge production
o
Who produces what knowledge, and who gets the
profits?
o
Shows historical imbalances in power
o
EX. Cultural knowledge extracted from its peopleàsold to publishing
companies, yet some people in the Native American tribe don’t even have access
to their own basic ancestral knowledge
§
Argument can essentially be made for all of
academic papers in academia
§
Field is based on exploitation
·
Power dynamic
o
Need to democratize knowledge
No comments:
Post a Comment