I'm not sure if that's what he meant. I think what he meant is that: use poor people cheaply for testing ==> make drugs faster ==> more poor people saved I'm really interested in the ethical questions involved in this matter, I'm sure of what side I am ethically on this, because I simply have to imagine what it would be if _I_ was the poor guinea pig (which could have happened btw, I was really really lucky to born to middle-class parents). But this is on very slippery slope; when you become desperate, it's where you start trying to justify a class of human beings as being `lesser'; and once you do that you've opened Pandora's box (Aryan race etc etc)

The goal should be for all people to have access to health care, and since it's less capital-intensive to launch a drug in India than it is in the US, then maybe that should be the norm. New drugs would be much more accessible with less investment to pay back.