A special Dispatches investigation into the drug trial performed in  Britain on behalf of a small German drug company.  After being given an experimental anti-cancer drug many of the volonteers thought they might die or suffer permanent damage to their immune systems.

With exclusive access to Ryan, a 20-year-old trainee plumber, one of the most badly affected drug trial “guinea pigs”, Dispatches captures the events  and the impact it has had on him and other other trial volonteers.

Reporter Brian Deer obtains confidential papers relating to the development of the drug, the way the trial was conducted and the initial treatment Ryan received. He travels to Germany and the US to track down and confront those responsible for the trial.

He pieces together an understanding of what went wrong and asks, as the search for new drugs moves away from chemistry towards biotechnology, whether what happened to Ryan Wilson is a warning for us all.