Healthy Volunteers in Commercial Clinical Drug Trials: When Human Beings Become Guinea Pigs

Contemporary society’s, especially the West, has seen an increase in the production and use of pharmaceutical products, particularly for disease treatment. Healthy volunteers play a very role in the development of drugs needed for such purposes, as the process requires testing for safety and efficacy of such drugs on healthy individuals as part of authorization process. However, particularly in the UK, very little is known experiences of healthy volunteers in commercial phase I clinical trials. This is despite that the fact clinical drug trials take place on a large scale. In this important text Shadreck Mwale provides a richly detailed contribution to our understanding of healthy volunteer experiences in clinical drug trials in the UK. The text critiques common conceptions of the terms volunteer and altruism as used in policy and practice of human involvement in clinical trials. It calls for an awareness of the complexity of the terms and how the social contexts participants find themselves in shapes acts of voluntarism in clinical drug trials.