Check out the video:
Selling Your Body (for Science)
An interesting video/report from Time magazine was sent to us today about people who make a living by joining clinical trials testing new drug for pharmaceutical companies. The big draw for participants seems to be that they can make upwards of $400 per day. With virtually no oversight on such trials, or the participants (it is left up to participants to gauge their health and whether they can continue or join new trials), people are traveling from city to city and making a living on the practice. There is even a call to professionalize the practice of "guinea pigging". The money does beat a number of other job options out there, but the toll on such regular participants is left unstudied. What is the purpose of clinical trials? Drugs that pass clinical trials are apt to make pharmaceutical companies billions of dollars. Meanwhile testing on humans is done by paying participants a couple thousand (at the most). This is yet another clear example of how the corporate world utilizes the worker (here, clinical trial participants) to create its enormous wealth. The ethics of capitalism never cease to amaze.
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A long those lines is the book that Jennifer is currently reading (and whose author I think you will be seeing on Tuesday). The idea that so much in medicine has happened because of one lady's cells and yet her family gets nothing out of it.
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