When I was in college, a friend told me something that sounded too good to be true: I could get paid forty dollars for a blood test. And if I didn’t have a history of a certain symptom, they would pay me forty dollars every month for the next two years in exchange for more blood tests. They were in the last year of signing up subjects for a clinical trial (something I’d read about in my biochemistry classes) on a common, as-of-yet uncured disease for which a bigger pharmaceutical company had developed a vaccine. There were no abnormal reactions worse than those of a flu shot, and I might get the placebo, making the whole thing even more of a walk in the park. The first nurse I talked to assured me that during the trial, anyone contracting the disease would receive immediate and free treatment for as long as it was required, even if they had been on the placebo.
If the above sounds like your dream job, you can be a guinea pig, joining the ranks of many familiar faces from Western popular culture. Medical test subject was the entry-level occupation in the first version of The Sims, and is featured a few times on the Simpsons. When Bart gets expelled, he imagines a future testing dangerous food additives; the “2-4-dexoxypropaniramine” in Nature’s Goodness, a new diet soft drink, mutates him into a hulking beast (whereupon the lead scientist remarks “pleasing taste, slight monsterism”). In a different episode, Homer signs up to be a guinea pig at the “Screaming Monkey Research Lab” where he goes blind from a diet pill.
