The Professional Guinea Pig: Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human Subjects (Duke University Press, August).
The book's primary purpose is to offer a detailed description of medical volunteering and its contexts, not to weigh in on the ethics of clinical trials. But after his year in the field, Mr. Abadie does have opinions about policy: Volunteers underestimate their long-term risks, he says, and universities should do more to protect them.
"Philosophers and bioethicists are very logical, and they can construct strong arguments," Mr. Abadie says. "But what they can't do is to go in there and do what I did—to do an in-depth ethnographic analysis, spending weeks and months with volunteers. Knowing who they are, what their neighborhoods look like, how they go through the trials, how they think and talk about the risks they're taking."
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