This month’s web round up focuses on notions of treatment as enhancement…or vice versa? I’ve recently come off a stretch of spending quite a lot of time reading up on debates surrounding behavioral disorders in children. One issue that seems to crop up repeatedly is whether the use of medications in these young populations, particularly those living with ADHD, is …
Tag Archives: Pharma
Biofinance: Speculation, Risk, Debt, and Value from Bios: A conference report
How does the financialization of life itself figure as a new means of producing value in modern technoscience? That is the question that motivated Kirk Fiereck to convene the panel “Biofinance: Speculation, Risk, Debt, and Value from Bios” at the 2016 American Anthropological Association meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota this November. Fiereck, panelists Melina Sherman, Danya Glabau, and Emily Xi Lin, …
Web Roundup: Controversy and Commerce
There have been many controversies about substantial and sudden jumps in pharmaceutical prices, the most memorable/infamous surrounding Martin Shkreli, the [widely despised and thoroughly unrepentant] former CEO of the drug company Turing, and the 5000% increase in the price of a drug used by many AIDS patients. Similar questions of impropriety have been raised by the practices …
Why Does Everyone Hate Martin Shkreli?
The investor-boy-wunderkind-turned-pharmaceutical-CEO Martin Shkreli was the end of the year’s emblem of schadenfreude. Shkreli has been in the news regularly since September 2015 when his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, announced plans to raise the price of decades-old toxoplasmosis drug Daraprim from $13.50 to $750 per pill. Public discussion about Turing’s pricing strategy prompted a congressional hearing on drug pricing and …
Web Roundup: A busy month for Pharma…
This month it was hard not to pay attention to what was happening in the world of Pharma, where several cases came to light illustrating just how murky and contested the role of one of the most powerful industries in the world is in shaping not just business practices, but collective social and moral consciousness as well.
A recent Gallup …
Kristin Peterson’s Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria
This article is part of the series: Second opinion
Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria
Duke University Press, 2014, 256 pages.
Chemical Arbitrage
We tend to think of pharmaceuticals as chemical matter caught up in complicated legal and economic relationships, but it is probably more useful to think of them as legal artifacts oriented towards a potential (but by no means guaranteed) biochemical …