Overview
The Professional Guinea Pig documents the emergence of the professional research subject in Phase I clinical trials testing the safety of drugs in development. Until the mid-1970s Phase I trials were conducted on prisoners. After that practice was outlawed, the pharmaceutical industry needed a replacement population and began to aggressively recruit healthy, paid subjects, some of whom came to depend on the income, earning their living by continuously taking part in these trials. Drawing on ethnographic research among self-identified ""professional guinea pigs"" in Philadelphia, Roberto Abadie examines their experiences and views on the conduct of the trials and the risks they assume by participating. Some of the research subjects he met had taken part in more than eighty Phase I trials. While the professional guinea pigs tended to believe that most clinical trials pose only a moderate health risk, Abadie contends that the hazards presented by continuous participation, such as exposure to potentially dangerous drug interactions, are discounted or ignored by research subjects in need of money. The risks to professional guinea pigs are also disregarded by the pharmaceutical industry, which has become dependent on the routine participation of experienced research subjects. Arguing that financial incentives compromise the ethical imperative for informed consent to be freely given by clinical-trials subjects, Abadie confirms the need to reform policies regulating the participation of paid subjects in Phase I clinical trials.
Full Product Details
Author: Roberto Abadie
Publisher: Duke University Press
Imprint: Duke University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.60cm
, Height: 1.20cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.286kg
ISBN: 9780822348238
ISBN 10: 0822348233
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 30 July 2010
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Roberto Abadie has given us a deep, complex and profoundly disturbing investigation into the dark underside of the clinical trials industry. The Professional Guinea Pig is not just ethnography. It is a call to action. oCarl Elliott, author of Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream
Roberto Abadie has given us a deep, complex and profoundly disturbing investigation into the dark underside of the clinical trials industry. The Professional Guinea Pig is not just ethnography. It is a call to action. oCarl Elliott, author of Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream [Abadie's] book is an ethnographic account of the subculture of paid volunteers recruited to serve as subjects for pharmaceutical testing -- with a particular focus on what he calls the professionalized guinea pigs who derive most (or all) of their income from this work. Volunteers receive from $1200 for three or four days in less intensive trials, according to Abadie, to $5000 for three or four weeks in more extensive ones. ... Abadie's description of the guinea-pig milieu ... Focuses on how they understand the risks involved in making a living this way, including their preferred means of recovering between rounds of exposure to phase I testing. - Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Education Lodged somewhere between the secrecy and the scandals is the work of a new generation of ethnographers who are quietly studying the way the clinical trials business operates. What interests [them] is not so much the occasional outrage uncovered by investigative reporters, or even the formal regulation of clinical trials. They are more concerned with the everyday pressures and moral choices facing the workers who man the production line: the private sector Physicians who conduct the trials, the study of monitors and trial co-ordinators who oversee them, and the research subjects who take experimental drugs often in exchange for free medical care or a wage. What does clinical research look like when everyone is in it for the money? - Carl Elliott, London Review of Books
Author Information
Roberto Abadie is a visiting scholar with the Health Sciences Doctoral Programs at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
