Abstract
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Highlights
In the shadows of tomorrow ‘healthy volunteers’ participate in clinical trials out of altruism, providing free labor for science and development
I argue that for many Liberians, the decision to participate in Ebola vaccine clinical trials was embedded in historical and ongoing systems of exploitation, and was powerfully shaped by the fact that trial participation allowed them to obtain medical care and socioeconomic benefits that were otherwise out of reach
I suggest that photographs of the material and social contexts in which clinical trials unfold in Liberia and elsewhere can reveal important dynamics that are not taken into account by normative bioethics
Summary
In the shadows of tomorrow ‘healthy volunteers’ participate in clinical trials out of altruism, providing free labor for science and development. Photograph 1 documents a community that might be seen, through the lens of normative bioethics, as having made an important, altruistic contribution to science and development by hosting Liberia’s first large-scale randomized Ebola vaccine clinical trial. Joshua’s participation in the clinical trial, like many others in the community, was not born out of volunteerism and altruism, but rather was built upon the precarity of the place where the trial research took place.
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