Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine the concept of biowork on the example of paid participation in the first phase of clinical trials. In the article I seek answers to two main questions – whether being a drugs tester should be considered as a profession; and what makes contemporary forms of biowork so controversial. Taking into account a dynamic development of biotechnology one may risk a hypothesis that new forms of biowork will appear more frequently, thus the need to answer above questions seems even more burning. The problem of biowork cannot be solved using purely technical means, without reflection on the meaning of human work, the definition of freedom or even the role of the state.