Paid to be a guinea pig

Risks from participating in medical trials are greater than many people imagine, reports Yang Wanli.

Dressed in a well-tailored black suit, 26-year-old Ren Tianyue walked along a street in Beijing's financial district. His neat, freshly ironed shirt and classy black-framed glasses gave him the air of a white-collar worker at a big-money enterprise.

Seeing Ren like this, few people would imagine that he used to earn a living by being a guinea pig in medical trials, testing a variety of medicines from pills to treat nasal inflammation to insulin injections. The payment per trial ranged from a few hundred yuan to 8,000 yuan ($1,300), depending on the drugs involved.