In the Same Vein: The Hepatitis B Vaccine and America’s Dirty Blood
Lochlann Jain, Stanford University / King’ College London
Monday, 30 September, 15:00 – 17:00
Venue: Violet Laidlaw Room, 6th Floor, Chrystal Macmillan Building
After a full-house first session with excellent discussions yesterday, we are excited to invite you all to our second seminar in 2019/2020. This upcoming session is co-hosted with the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology. There will be biscuits, tea and coffee before and after the seminar.
Our Speaker
Our speaker on Monday 30 September will be Lochlann Jain, who is a professor of Anthropology at Stanford University and a Visiting Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’ College London. Jain is an award-winning scholar and artist and their research falls at the intersection of law, science and technology studies, and medicine and aims to understand how knowledge formations underpin common sense ideas. They are the author of a range of excellent publications on medicine, science & technology as well as auto mobility and have published three books. The most widely known book is certainly ‘Malignant. How Cancer Becomes Us.’ (UC Press: 2013), which has received praise for its "brilliant and disturbing" (Nature Magazine) account of uncertainty around cancer in modern society and is a “scholarly, angry, intimate, objective, smart, moving book that teaches us how to endure and even maybe thrive in the ‘rubble.’” (Donna Haraway) Her latest book has turned to the relations of art and social science, experimenting in graphic philosophy. In our seminar on Monday, Jain will turn to their most recent research on the history of the Hepatitis B Vaccine in the USA.
Speaker’s Abstract
The talk will track two parallel stories. First, the practices of industrial blood extraction and trade that led to exploding rates of hepatitis B circulation will be contextualized in light of the enabling legal, medical, and regulatory conditions. Second, the development of the hepatitis B vaccine will be explored focusing in particular on the trials of the 1970s. I analyse how varied and shifting rhetorics of class, sexuality, and criminality played out in the medical and social understandings of hepatitis B in ways that consistently downplayed its seriousness, and set the path for how an emerging HIV was articulated as disease in the early 1980s.