[Sci-tech-public] STS Circle, April 29 - Kaushik Sunder Rajan (Please RSVP)

[STS]

STS Circle at Harvard
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Kaushik Sunder Rajan
Chicago, Anthropology

on
The Scandal of the Trial: HPV Vaccines, Public Health, and Knowledge / Value


Monday, April 29
12:15-2:00 p.m.
Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street, Room 100F

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Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu> by 5pm Wednesday, April 24.

Abstract:

In early April 2010, the Indian Council for Medical Research (ICMR) halted a project that involved the experimental administration of Gardasil, a vaccine developed by Merck used to prevent human papilloma virus (HPV) infection, in Bhadrachalam, in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The study was shut down because of apparent reports of violations of ethical guidelines. An immediate focal point of controversy was that Bhadrachalam is a predominantly tribal area, and questions were asked about conducting a study on tribal girls. This controversy developed into a full-blown controversy in its own right, but has also become the focal point of emergent civil society advocacy in India against unethical clinical trials.



I describe this controversy as an entry point into a broader consideration of the politics around pharmaceuticals and health in India today. How do these politics emerge in relation to global logics of biocapital? In what ways does public health get conscripted into, and changed in the process of, articulations with these global logics? What kinds of experimental subjectivity get produced as a consequence? I argue that what is at stake here is the re-theorization of knowledge, of value, and of the nature of their articulation, and the necessity of asking questions of the ethical and the political in the light of such re-theorizations.



Biography: Kaushik Sunder Rajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. He was initially trained as a biologist, obtained his PhD in the History and Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, and works on the anthropology of science, technology and medicine. His work has focused on a number of interrelated events and emergences: firstly, the increased corporatization of life science research; secondly, the emergence of new technologies and epistemologies within the life sciences, such as, significantly, genomics; and thirdly, the fact that these technoscientific and market emergences were not simply occurring in the United States, but rather globally. His book, Biocapital: The Constitution of Post-Genomic Life, tries to capture a flavor of these emergences. On the one hand, it is a multi-sited ethnography of emergent genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India. On the other hand, it traces the historical emergence of what he calls biocapital in the late 20th century, and interrogates the nature and manner of the co-production of economic and epistemic value in the life sciences today. Sunder Rajan is currently researching the political economy of pharmaceutical development in India in the context of changes in global capital flows and governance regimes.



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