AO: Crane draws heavily on Petryna’s work using her term, ‘ethical variability’ (Petryna 2005), which describes how recourse to local standards of care allow for-profit contract research organizations (CROs) to outsource clinical trials to lower-income countries where they can finesse the international ethics codes that protect human research subjects to their commercial and scientific advantage. But she argues that the relationship between disaster, assistance, and opportunity is more complex and there are significant differences between the ‘outsourced’ corporate drug trials Petryna studies and studies of mother-to-child HIV transmission conducted in Africa.
