When Experiments Travel - Relationships to Power and Knowledge Production

Throughout our readings in this course, the recurring theme I keep encountering is the idea of Knowledge Production in Western science and the Power that it requires and produces. In our past readings on the use of DNA technology to establish supposedly Native American ancestry, and in our discussions of the motivation behind the innovation of new DNA techniques to identify the missing men and boys from Srebrenica, we saw how those in power influenced the development and employment of these methods. This power-knowledge-power cycle works to reify the power of those who direct the path of knowledge production and to further normalize their produced knowledge as standard and "infallible."
In the first chapter of "When Experiments Travel," we see this same power dynamic play out in the production of knowledge not only about the effects of experimental medicines and medical technologies, but also regarding the very meanings of the ethics guidelines put in place to regulate the testing that produces experimental medical knowledge. The oversaturation of the Western populations to whom these drugs will be most accessible is the result of the work of predominantly Western scientists, who then use their power and authority established by this earlier work to exploit vulnerable populations to further their knowledge production. Not only that, but these scientists also engage in producing new definitions of ethics to suit their own needs and to ensure the survival of their clinical trials.
It is interesting to regularly confront this power dynamic in the production of scientific knowledge, especially as a scientist from a historically marginalized and exploited population. I reflect upon my own recent experiences with other scientists and even staff who work for local IRBs and HRPOs, when my research in my own community was questioned and scrutinized by individuals whose subjective definitions of "ethical" conduct hold far less weight in the research process than do my own ethical understandings and those of my community. I wonder how these clinical trials might change if the global research sites that hosted them required that researchers and members of the affected vulnerable populations be represented, or even more impactfully, be the researchers themselves.