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I just received the abstract for tomorrow's STS colloquium from Kaushik
Sunder Rajan and wanted to share it with you:<br><br>
<u>Abstract<br>
</u>In this talk, I am interested in the articulations between clinical
research, biomedical epistemology, pharmaceutical development and
property regimes, in a historical conjuncture in India that is marked
simultaneously by attempts at global commensuration on the one hand, and
the emergence of particular national legal and political trajectories on
the other. I focus on the case of a new institutional cluster for
translational research, Translational Health Science and Technology
Institute (THSTI), which is being set up in India in collaboration with
MIT. I situate this case against other situations, concerning the
globalization of clinical trials and of intellectual property regimes in
drug development, in order to trace the various logics of the global
biomedical economy. Some of these logics, I suggest, are potentially
about the establishment and expansion of monopoly capitalism, and are in
tension with other logics that are more experimental and open-ended.
Hence, the paper traces how emergent technoscientific and institutional
forms of biomedicine are being established and contested in the Indian
context, and what law, capital, ideology and epistemology have to do with
these forms.<br><br>
<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite=""><div align="center"><font size=4>
<b><u>STS Colloquium<br><br>
</u></font><font size=5>Monday, April 27<br><br>
</font><font size=5 color="#0000FF">Translational and Transnational
Transformations in Indian Biomedicine<br><br>
</font><font size=5>Kaushik Sunder Rajan<br>
</font>Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California,
Irvine<br><br>
<br>
<font size=4>4:00 pm, MIT, E51-095<br><br>
</b></font></div>
Please join us on Monday, April 27, for the final talk in our spring
series on Science and Technology in Africa, Asia, and Beyond.
Kaushik Sunder Rajan was initially trained as a biologist. He
obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in the History and Social Studies of Science
and Technology (now known as HASTS), and works on the anthropology of
science and technology. He is the author of <i>Biocapital: The
Constitution of Postgenomic Life</i> (Duke University Press,
2006).</blockquote></body>
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