Synthesizing Hope : Matter, Knowledge, and Place in South African Drug Discovery / Anne Pollock.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Pollock, Anne, author.

Series:

Chicago scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

iThemba Pharmaceuticals.

Pharmaceutical industry--South Africa.

Pharmaceutical industry.

Drugs--Research--South Africa.

Drugs.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (198 pages)

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2019]

Summary:

Synthesizing Hope opens up the material and social world of pharmaceuticals by focusing on an unexpected place: iThemba Pharmaceuticals. Founded in 2009 with a name taken from the Zulu word for hope, the small South African startup with an elite international scientific board was tasked with drug discovery for tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria. Anne Pollock uses this company as an entry point for exploring how the location of scientific knowledge production matters, not only for the raw materials, manufacture, licensing, and distribution of pharmaceuticals but also for the making of basic scientific knowledge. Consideration of this case exposes the limitations of global health frameworks that implicitly posit rich countries as the only sites of knowledge production. Analysis of iThemba identifies the problems inherent in global north/south divides at the same time as it highlights what is at stake in who makes knowledge and where. It also provides a concrete example for consideration of the contexts and practices of postcolonial science, its constraints, and its promise. Synthesizing Hope explores the many legacies that create conditions of possibility for South African drug discovery, especially the specific form of settler colonialism characterized by apartheid and resource extraction. Paying attention to the infrastructures and laboratory processes of drug discovery underscores the materiality of pharmaceuticals from the perspective of their makers, and tracing the intellectual and material infrastructures of South African drug discovery contributes new insights about larger social, political, and economic orders.

Contents:

Introduction

Hope in South African Drug Discovery

1. Questioning the Bifurcations in Global Health Discourses

2. In the Shadows of the Dynamite Factory

3. Three Science for a Post- apartheid South Africa

4. "African Solutions for African Problems"

5. Immateriality of Pharmaceutical Knowledge Making

6. Hope in Flow.

Notes:

Previously issued in print: 2019.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226629216

022662921X

OCLC:

1098034050