[Sci-tech-public] STS Circle, December 6th - Anne Pollock - (please RSVP)

[Harvard STS]

*STS Circle at Harvard*
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*Anne Pollock
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*Georgia Tech*
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on

*Big Pharma Stagnant and Dynamic: Transforming the Critique*
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Monday, December 6th
12:15-2:00 p.m.
124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106

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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts <sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<sts at hks.harvard.edu>
 by 5pm Thursday, December 2nd.

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*Abstract:* Intersecting fields of scholarship have accounted for
pharmaceutical companies' extraordinary success in promoting and profiting
from their wares.  This article instead tracks resistances and failures in
the terrain of Big Pharma amid economic, epistemological, and political
challenges to their business models. Pfizer has been a key player in the
rise of Big Pharma, and its fortunes since 2006 provide windows into the
industry's stagnation - the failure of Pfizer's would-be blockbuster
torcetrapib, the closing of its heart disease research unit, its free drug
program for newly unemployed Americans. These illustrate transformations in
"least neglected diseases" and in pricing structures, and can be understood
in the contexts of both biotech and Global South critique.  Biotech
companies have remained profitable by creating biologics for niche subsets
of rich populations with a high willingness to pay (including lucrative
treatments I call "drugs for short lives"). At the same time, dominant
global capitalists/philanthropists have brought unprecedented funding to
making treatment for AIDS and TB available to the poor and tackling
long-neglected diseases like malaria.  Now that pharmaceutical profits and
markets seem less than infinite in their expansion and philanthropy has been
pharmaceuticalized, the stakes of demands like "medicine for people not for
profit" are changing. STS critique of pharmaceuticals should take these
transformations into account as it deepens its systemic critique of global
inequality.

*Biography*: Anne Pollock is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology
and Culture in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at
Georgia Tech. Trained in the interdisciplinary field of Science, Technology
& Society at MIT, her research focuses on biomedicine and culture.  She is
particularly interested in how medical categories and technologies are
enrolled in telling stories about identity and difference, especially with
regard to race, gender, and citizenship. She is currently revising her book
manuscript about the intersecting trajectories of race, pharmaceuticals, and
cardiovascular disease in the United States from the founding of cardiology
to the commercial failure of BiDil.  She is also engaged in two ongoing
projects: one about feminism and heart disease, and the other about global
pharmaceuticals amid economic crisis and the pharmaceuticalization of
philanthropy.

A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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