[Sci-tech-public] Abstract for Kaushik Sunder Rajan's STS Colloquium

[Debbie Meinbresse]

I just received the abstract for tomorrow's STS colloquium from 
Kaushik Sunder Rajan and wanted to share it with you:

Abstract
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.


>STS Colloquium
>
>Monday, April 27
>
>Translational and Transnational Transformations in Indian Biomedicine
>
>Kaushik Sunder Rajan
>Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
>
>
>4:00 pm, MIT, E51-095
>
>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 
>Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life (Duke University Press, 2006).
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