Adverse events and placebo effects: African scientists, HIV, and ethics in the ‘global health sciences’

This paper builds on the growing literature in ‘postcolonial technoscience’ by examining how science and ethics travel in transnational HIV research. The author uses examples of two controversial US-funded studies of mother-to-child transmission in Africa as case studies through which to explore quandaries of difference and inequality in global health research. The author aims to raise some questions about transnational research, science and ethics that often get lost in public controversies over the moral status of such trials. Using interviews conducted with American and Ugandan HIV researchers as well as relevant material published in the popular and medical press, the author explores how researchers from ‘resource-poor settings’ must often walk a tightrope between claims of difference from the global North and assertions of sameness, in which a claim too forceful in either direction can undermine the ethical — and thus scientific — legitimacy of their research.