In the wake of the decolonization movement in South Africa and around the world, this edited work presents fresh evidence and advances new arguments on the politics and economics of colonial biomedical knowledge in South Africa and other parts of the African continent. Covering a richly diverse set of fields---including human genetics, obstetrics, occupational therapy, medical photography and the vaccine sciences---the book demonstrates the troubled histories and the enduring effects of imperial knowledge decades since the end of colonial rule and apartheid. This is a valuable text on the politics of the biomedical sciences written from the perspective of the African continent, and at the same time it revisits knowledge/power relationships between the majority (“global South”) and minority (“global north”) words in a historical perspective and in their contemporary expression in the disciplines. The immediate benefit is a reference resource for medical science researchers, and a teaching text for senior undergraduate and postgraduate students. The book is further composed as an accessible, readable and interesting text on politics and medicine in Africa for the discerning lay reader.

Biomedicine in the Twentieth Century: Practices, Policies, and Politics is a testimony to the growing interest of scholars in the development of the biomedical sciences in the twentieth century and to the number of historians, social scientists and health policy analysts now working on the subject. The book is comprised of essays by noted historians and social scientists that offer insights on a range of subjects that should be a significant stimulus for further historical investigation. It details the NIH’s practices, policies and politics on a variety of fronts, including the development of the intramural program, the National Institute of Mental Health and mental health policy, the politics and funding of heart transplantation and the initial focus of the National Cancer Institute. Comparisons can be made with the development of other American and British institutions involved in medical research, such as the Rockefeller Institute and the Medical Research Council. Discussions of the larger scientific and social context of United States’ federal support for research, the role of lay institutions in federal funding of virus research, the consequences of technology transfer and patenting, the effects of vaccine and drug development and the environment of research discoveries all offer new insights and suggest questions for further exploration.

This textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the interdisciplinary field of the Social Studies of Science and Technology (SSST). Over the past two decades, the biomedical sciences have transformed our understanding of the relationship between the social and natural worlds, while its ‘promissory visions’ are seen to offer extraordinary opportunities for economic and social development. But alongside these scientific innovations have emerged new, and frequently unanticipated social, political, bioethical, and legal dilemmas and challenges. This cutting-edge text explores ‘post-genomic’ developments in the field of pharmacogenomics and the prospects for a new ‘precision’ or personalised medicine; the potential of environmental epigenetics to reconfigure the boundaries of the social and natural worlds; the emergence of an array of ‘neuro-disciplines’, seeking to identify the neural basis of a whole range of social and economic behaviours; and the challenges of constructing a coherent and robust governance framework for the conduct of biomedical science research and innovation, responsive to the social and health needs of the whole population.

Epstein shows the extent to which AIDS research has been a social and political phenomenon and how the AIDS movement has transformed biomedical research practices through its capacity to garner credibility by novel strategies.

The publication of this book, comprising chapters written by distinguished scholars, is a timely recognition that these days we are bombarded by suggestions that knowledge is power, that we are operating in a knowledge economy, and that the greatest driver for financial growth and national development is the knowledge industry. There are more sources of knowledge available to a wider range of the worlds population than ever before. The Internet has made the dissemination of knowledge possible in ways not contemplated fifty years ago. National boundaries are crossed with consummate ease. Knowledge is not like other assets. It can be accessed rapidly and used by thousands, often millions, of people. This makes knowledge as an asset that generated much of the wealth in the early development of most nations. And different countries and regions need different strategies to support and promote the growth of their knowledge economies. These call for nationally and regionally-based approaches, and they entail new dynamics and challenges in wealth creation, legal regulation, national and social organization and the protection of environmental and natural resources. Issued jointly by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

This book explores the decline of the teaching of epistemic, conceptual knowledge in schools, its replacement with everyday social knowledge, and its relation to changes in the division of labor within the global economy. It argues that the emphasis on social knowledge in postmodern and social constructionist pedagogy compounds the problem, and examines the consequences of these changes for educational opportunity and democracy itself.

The spectacular development of medical knowledge over the last two centuries has brought intrusive advances in the capabilities of medical technology. These advances have been remarkable over the last century, but especially over the last few decades, culminating in such high technology interventions as heart transplants and renal dialysis. These increases in medical powers have attracted societal interest in acquiring more such knowledge. They have also spawned concerns regarding the use of human subjects in research and regarding the byproducts of basic research as in the recent recombinant DNA debate. As a consequence of the development of new biomedical knowledge, physicians and biomedical scientists have been placed in positions of new power and responsibility. The emergence of this group of powerful and knowledgeable experts has occasioned debates regarding the accountability of physicians and biomedical scientists. But beyond that, the very investment of resources in the acquisition of new knowledge has been questioned. Societies must decide whether finite resources would not be better invested at this juncture, or in general, in the alleviation of the problems of hunger or in raising general health standards through interventions which are less dependent on the intensive use of high technology. To put issues in this fashion touches on philosophical notions concerning the claims of distributive justice and the ownership of biomedical knowledge.

"Medicine and the Politics of Knowledge situates South Africa - including its history of stances and political formations around HIV/AIDS - in the broader context of questions relating to science, medicine, human experimentation, and structural violence, all of which shape the cases in the book. Putting South Africa in the context of other cases of contention and contestation about science and medicine in India, Latin America and China helps us to understand the particular history of the South African case itself. Conceived in response to the urgency of bioethical debates in medical anthropology, this ethnographic collection touches the borders of anthropology, philosophy, and public health"--Publisher's website.

Motivated by the explosion of molecular data on humans-particularly data associated with individual patients-and the sense that there are large, as-yet-untapped opportunities to use this data to improve health outcomes, Toward Precision Medicine explores the feasibility and need for "a new taxonomy of human disease based on molecular biology" and develops a potential framework for creating one. The book says that a new data network that integrates emerging research on the molecular makeup of diseases with clinical data on individual patients could drive the development of a more accurate classification of diseases and ultimately enhance diagnosis and treatment. The "new taxonomy" that emerges would define diseases by their underlying molecular causes and other factors in addition to their traditional physical signs and symptoms. The book adds that the new data network could also improve biomedical research by enabling scientists to access patients' information during treatment while still protecting their rights. This would allow the marriage of molecular research and clinical data at the point of care, as opposed to research information continuing to reside primarily in academia. Toward Precision Medicine notes that moving toward individualized medicine requires that researchers and health care providers have access to very large sets of health- and disease-related data linked to individual patients. These data are also critical for developing the information commons, the knowledge network of disease, and ultimately the new taxonomy.

But today normality itself is open to medical modification.