Making a Living as a Human Guinea Pig
Tough times bring out the clever, the creative and, sometimes, the “questionable” choices of many people searching for a way to bring in more money.
I came across the blog of Just Another Lab Rat, who offers a candid, insider’s view of what it ’s like to make a career out of volunteering as a human guinea pig.
According to the author, who’s been subjecting himself to prodding, poking, ingesting untried medications and what he estimates to be about 1,500 blood draws every year for four years, the average person who does studies “for a living” can earn from $18,000 to $28,000 a year. Since there’s a mandatory wait period of at least 30 days between studies to ensure that any drugs taken exit the body completely, he advises people who decide to embark on a lab rat career to find work in between studies (like temp agencies or hourly jobs) that give them blocks of time off to free them up for the lab studies.
Human guinea pig work is not for everyone. In-house patient studies can last up to 30 nights, during which time you have to stay at the medical facility 24 hours a day. You could earn $400 to $800 for a three-day study or $3,500 to $5,000 for a 30-day study. Outpatient studies, on the other hand, might test the efficacy of investigational drugs or medical devices, from a brain-imaging scanner to latex gloves.
The author goes into great details to answer questions like, “Do I have to pay taxes?” (Yes, for gross earning above $600 annually) and “How can I increase my chances of being selected for a study?” (It’s a young person’s gig. The cutoff for many studies is age 45.)
Subjecting oneself to the advancement of science is really nothing new, although I never considered making a career of it. As high school students, my friends and I, if bitten by the same cold bug, would skip going to bed and instead troop off to the local medical facility that tested various cold remedies regularly. They’d pay us $50 or so for our trouble as we killed four hours in their waiting room, hacking away, spreading our germs and generally feeling miserable.
If things got really bad, would you ever resort to such measures? What’s the most drastic measure you’ve taken to earn a little extra cash?
