When human beings become guinea pigs

In this concluding chapter‚ I present the overall argument of this book. My discussion in this book situates human involvement in clinical drug trials in the institutional and sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and sociocultural context that shapes human participation in medical research. This approach has been useful in developing a nuanced understanding of the policy context and the experiences of healthy volunteers in phase I commercial clinical drug trials. Contextualizing the topic in this manner brings about an understanding of healthy volunteers as subjects capable of resisting and negotiating complex and often conflicting socioeconomic and sociopolitical milieus in clinical drug trials. In this chapter‚ I review the discussion generated so far on healthy volunteering in the UK, and I draw out the implications of the research. These reviews center on the adequacy of existing regulatory structures in protecting healthy volunteers, and how risk in clinical drug trials is perceived by the actors