The Institutional Review Board called a meeting with Zaidi and the principal investigators, none of whom showed up. They tried to keep me quiet about it. Zaidi is currently embroiled in a bitter lawsuit against the university. Though the Heliobacter pylori study was eventually terminated and the researchers placed on probation, such recruitment of subjects for research protocols is common on university campuses across the nation. Subjects earn anywhere from a few to thousands of dollars for participating in these clinical trials.
Ads recruiting students for research protocols dot the hallways of universities.
They appear in student publications and local newspapers. You can even sign up on the Web at CenterWatch for more than 41,000 research protocols around the country, a mere fraction of the trials under way at any given time. Though researchers typically deny any connection between high student populations and clinical trials, those areas dense with students, such as Boston, the Research Triangle area of North Carolina and Austin, Texas, typically have the most protocols at any given time. Students as lab rats are nothing new. In the past it was a common requirement for psych majors to participate in their professors' psychology protocols.