The Normals: A People’s History of Modern America in Five Human Experiments

"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.