Ensaios clínicos com vcinas anti-HIV/AIDS:a rotina de incorporação de uma prática científica

Abstract

Study follows routine of a clinical trial on experimental anti-HIV/AIDS vaccines performed at the Praça Onze Project of UFRJ (Rio de Janeiro Federal University), in collaboration with the HIV Vaccine Trials Network and supported by NIHs (National Institutes of Health) in the USA. It focuses on the process of recruting, selecting and doing the follow-up of trial volunteers and on the articulation of more general aspects to local demands and particularities of a study when carried out in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. From the theoreticalconceptual standpoint, it uses resources originated from Social Sciences such as History and Sociology of Science, as well as from the interactionist current of Sociology. Study shows how, as in any clinical trial, the Praça Onze Project experiment is a collective activity sustained by multiple actors and diverse rationales which give rise to tension. The study focus mostly the tension between professionals (counselors, recruters, physicians, nurses, study managers and coordinators) expectation and the experiences undergone by volunteers, as the negotiations occurred during the protocol development phase. Professionals, in spite of their specificities, articulate themselves so as to incorporate the vocabulary and behavior found in the universe shared with their peers, this being a process of knowledge and practice hybridization. From the volunteer s standpoint, on one side, there is a submission to the discipline and commitment routine such process requires, offering their bodies to Medical Science. On the other side, there is an appropriation of the logic behind a clinical trial, with a self-perception of becoming someone playing a supporting role in the discovery of a new form of biotechnology; in this case, a life and death issue for them and for a collective of HIV infected people. For the volunteers, giving their bodies to science is part of the construction of a contemporary bioidentity and biopolitic, where science, society, technology and politics are interrelated.