The possession of kuru: medical science and biocolonial exchange

After biosovereignty: The material transfer agreement as technology of relations

Increasingly, countries in the Global South-notably South Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia-are introducing material transfer agreements (MTAs) into their domestic laws for the exchange of scientific material. The MTA is a contract securing the legal transfer of tangible research material between organizations such as laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, or universities. Critical commentators argue that these agreements in the Global North have come to fulfill an important role in the expansion of dominant intellectual property regimes. Taking Indonesia as a case, this article examines how MTAs are enacted and implemented differently in the context of research involving the Global South. Against the conventionally understood forms of contract that commodify and commercialize materials and knowledge, the MTA in the South can be understood as a legal technology appropriated to translate a formerly relational economy of the scientific gift to a market system of science. As a way of gaining leverage in the uneven space of the global bioeconomy, the MTA functions as a technology for 'reverse appropriation', a reworking of its usage and meaning as a way of countering some of the global power inequalities experienced by Global South countries. The operation of this reverse appropriation, however, is hybrid, and reveals a complex reconfiguration of scientific exchange amidst a growing push for 'open science'.

With strings attached: Gift-giving to the International Atomic Energy Agency and US foreign policy

In 1958 the United States of America offered two mobile radioisotope laboratories to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as gifts. For the USA, supplying the IAEA with gifts was not only the cost of "doing business" in the new nuclear international setting of the Cold War, but also indispensable in maintaining authority and keeping the upper hand within the IAEA and in the international regulation of nuclear energy. The transformation of a technoscientific artefact into a diplomatic gift with political strings attached for both giver and receiver, positions the lab qua gift as a critical key that simultaneously unlocks the overlapping histories of international affairs, Cold War diplomacy, and postwar nuclear science. Embracing political epistemology as my primary methodological framework and introducing the gift as a major analytic category, I emphasize the role of material objects in modeling scientific research and training in a way that is dictated by diplomatic negotiations, state power, and international legal arrangements.

After the double helix: Rosalind Franklin's research on Tobacco mosaic virus

Rosalind Franklin is best known for her informative X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA that provided vital clues for James Watson and Francis Crick's double-stranded helical model. Her scientific career did not end when she left the DNA work at King's College, however. In 1953 Franklin moved to J. D. Bernal's crystallography laboratory at Birkbeck College, where she shifted her focus to the three-dimensional structure of viruses, obtaining diffraction patterns of Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) of unprecedented detail and clarity. During the next five years, while making significant headway on the structural determination of TMV, Franklin maintained an active correspondence with both Watson and Crick, who were also studying aspects of virus structure. Developments in TMV research during the 1950s illustrate the connections in the emerging field of molecular biology between structural studies of nucleic acids and of proteins and viruses. They also reveal how the protagonists of the "race for the double helix" continued to interact personally and professionally during the years when Watson and Crick's model for the double-helical structure of DNA was debated and confirmed.

Thick Prescriptions: Toward an Interpretation of Pharmaceutical Sales Practices

Anthropologists of medicine and science are increasingly studying all aspects of pharmaceutical industry practices--from research and development to the marketing of prescription drugs. This article ethnographically explores one particular stage in the life cycle of pharmaceuticals: sales and marketing. Drawing on a range of sources-investigative journalism, medical ethics, and autoethnography--the author examines the day-to-day activities of pharmaceutical salespersons, or drug reps, during the 1990s. He describes in detail the pharmaceutical gift cycle, a three-way exchange network between doctors, salespersons, and patients and how this process of exchange is currently in a state of involution. This gift economy exists to generate prescriptions (scripts) and can mask and/or perpetuate risks and side effects for patients. With implications of pharmaceutical industry practices impacting everything from the personal-psychological to the global political economy, medical anthropologists can play a lead role in the emerging scholarly discourse concerned with critical pharmaceutical studies.

Kuru, Prions, and Human Affairs: Thinking About Epidemics

▪ Abstract  The study of epidemics provides a unique point of entry for examining the relationships among cultural assumptions, institutional forms, and states of mind. The Black Death is said to have contributed to the emergence of nation states, the rise of mercantile economies, and the religious movements that led to the Reformation. It may also have brought about new ways of understanding God, the meaning of death, and the role of authority in religious and social life. Cholera induced a public health approach that stressed quarantine, and venereal diseases led to contact tracing. Western medicine, however, failed to cure the epidemics that resulted from imperial expansion into the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. The focus of this essay is on the impact of two contemporary epidemics considered to be caused by prions, a newly recognized infectious agent: kuru in Papua New Guinea and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (associated with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) in Europe. A close look at epidemics constitutes a sampling device for illuminating relationships among illness, social forms, and social thought. Theories of disease causation provide ways of thinking about the world and sets of directions for acting in it.