Paul Farmer

About the author: Paul Farmer is a professor of social medicine at Harvard Medical School and a world-renowned social medical activist. Dr. Farmer, an advocate for the poor and the suffering of the developing world, works with the Partners for Health and as an adviser on infectious diseases to the governments of several nations. Dr. Farmer lives and works most of the year in a village in Haiti.

When wealthy nations perform medical research in poorer countries, including research for AIDS medicines, ethical problems arise. One problem is that there are no practical guidelines to assure that participants from developing countries who volunteer in the research studies understand the purpose of the studies or what it means when they sign...