Acculturating Human Experimentation: An Empirical Survey in France

Abstract

Preliminary results of an empirical study of human experimentation practices are presented and contrasted with those of a survey conducted a hundred years ago when clinical research, although tolerated, was culturally deviant. Now that biomedical research is both authorized and controlled, its actors (sponsors, committees, investigators, subjects) come out with heterogeneous rationalities, and they appear to be engaged in a transactional process of negotiating their rationales with one another. In the European context protective of subjects, surprisingly the subjects we interviewed (and especially patient-subjects) were creative and revealed an aptitude for integrating experimental medicine into common culture.