The Normals - by Laura Stark (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

How healthy control subjects in clinical research transformed the practice and labor of science, as told by the Normals themselves.

In the 1950s, the National Institutes of Health were in search of a large, replenishing stream of healthy people to participate in clinical studies. To establish legal sources of test subjects, the NIH signed unprecedented contracts with American colleges, church organizations, and other government agencies, and in the process gave rise to a new type of test subject: the "normal patient." Thousands of them eventually moved into the NIH Clinical Center to live in hospital rooms, eat food prepared in a metabolic kitchen, and follow--or flout--the rules.

The Normals is a groundbreaking account of the NIH Normal Volunteer Patient Program, which has lasted into the twenty-first century. This program harnessed outside organizations in all areas of postwar American life--colleges and universities, labor unions, civic groups, federal prisons, and churches--to recruit research subjects for human experiments. Drawing on thousands of pages of unearthed government documents, oral histories, and personal materials shared by the patients themselves (collected in a new archive), Laura Stark follows five experiments and the people involved, delving into their biographies, their time at the Clinical Center, and the thorny problem of determining who counts as "normal." The "Normals" were not passive objects of study, Stark shows, but active research participants who collaborated with scientists, maintained the laboratories where they served, informed official ethics policies, and bargained to meet their needs.

By taking seriously the pillow fights and the first kisses, the bible clubs and the movie nights that animated the Clinical Center as much as the medical experiments, The Normals brings to life a surprising true story of the origins of our present-day system of human experiment, one that at once explores what it means to work, to serve, to volunteer.

Review Quotes

"This is a brilliant book. Stark fundamentally rewrites the history of clinical experimentation in postwar America. The book offers an exquisitely rendered and lucidly argued analysis of complex changes in the infrastructure, funding, and oversight of biomedical research. The Normals will be essential reading for generations of historians of science, medicine, and technology to come."

"Normalcy, this revelatory book shows, is a bureaucratic invention, built through federal contracts with colleges, unions, prisons, and churches, and shaped by the populations they made available for study. These institutional practices, which made White people the standard for the human body--with consequences for the health of us all--are in Stark's terms 'second-order discrimination.' Yet these human subjects were also agents: they bargained, organized, and changed the rules of American science. A rigorous, humane, and illuminating study."

About the Author

Laura Stark is associate professor at the Department for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Behind Closed Doors: IRBs and the Making of Ethical Research, published by the University of Chicago Press.