Human Guinea Pigs in the US

This semester, I am also taking cultural anthropology and the topic of the last class was medicalization. What interested me the most about this topic was the concept of human “guinea pigs” during clinical trials. Although we’ve talked about humans participating in global clinical trials in this (Dr. Song’s) class already, an image that the cultural anthropology professor put up in his powerpoint really struck a chord with me. I found the same image in one of my Google searches:

(source: http://planetxnews.com/2015/06/24/human-guinea-pigs-cia-human-experimentation/)

To depict a human being trapped in a cage like the above image and call these participants “guinea pigs” created a tone behind the phrase “humans participating in clinical trials” that reminded me of the mice I use in my research. Interestingly, I learned that there is a sizable group of people in Philadelphia (where a lot of pharmaceutical experiments occur) who regularly subject themselves to clinical trials as their main source of income. These participants even have several websites where they share insights, stories, and advice with each other (Guinea Pig Zero is one of the popular ones). In an interview that we watched of these "human guinea pigs," some of them openly admitted to participating in several trials at once to earn more money and others admitted that because the largest financial gain is at the end, it is not unusual for participants to keep going with the trial even if they are experiencing adverse side effects. This obviously has profound effects and brings up questions about the validity of the trials. The article reading we had to do for this topic was “Guinea Pigging in Philadelphia” by Roberto Abadie if anyone wants to check it out.

Also, an update on my second part of the social media norm breaching experiment. I decided to go with the “facebook wall inquisitor” that was outlined on the handout. To do this, I friend requested 4 people (2 complete strangers and 2 friend of friends) but none of them have responded to my friend requests yet so we’ll see how this goes. I also intentionally picked out friends of friends whom I’ve never met before or heard of, so we are basically strangers. I think nowadays people are more cautious about who they accept as their social media friends due to privacy concerns, which may be the reason why they have not accepted my friend requests.