Question: do you ever experiment on people? if so who?

Hannah Greenwood answered on 21 Jun 2015:

I was about to say I don’t really ‘experiment’ on people but then I thought about to some more and I guess I do! We’re not allowed to experiment on humans the same way we do animals though, messing around with their DNA for example. There are a lot of laws about including people (or taking samples from them – blood, saliva, urine etc.) in research. First, we have to get ethical approval meaning that we have to prove that our experiments are important, that there’s no other way to gain the information and that the information we would learn from the experiments would be valuable. If we get the approval, we have to then get permission from each and every patient in order to include them in the study, we have to explain exactly what we would like to do (in my study this includes taking a drug called simvastatin for 7 days and giving us a blood sample on days 0, 4 and 7), we have to let them know the risks that may be involved and any potential benefits. As you can see, there are a lot of hoops we have to jump through in order to include humans safely in our work but I think it’s worth it. We can do all the lab research, or animal research there we like but without doing the tests in humans then we won’t every really know if they will work.
The people that are included in my research are people over the age of 50 years who are admitted into hospital with pneumonia. We take blood from them to try and understand how their white blood cells deal with the infection and whether simvastatin can help them deal with the infections any better.

Hope this helps,
Hannah