United States | Platypus

Fake, Real, Real, Fake: Salvarsan on the US Medical Market

 Colin Garon  August 8, 2023

1913, Chicago: A reporter, assuming the name Edward Donlin, enters a downtown medical establishment that has advertised widely in Midwestern newspapers offering Dr. Paul Ehrlich’s new miraculous cure for ‘blood poison’—syphilis—for a price. ‘Donlin’ pays $2 in fees, then the consultation begins. He feigns concern about recent hair loss, and the doctor (who, matching the picture in advertisements, wears a Van Dyke beard) laughs strangely then turns grave: it is certainly syphilis. He recommends a Wassermann test, a recently-invented syphilis diagnostic, for $20 and Ehrlich’s Salvarsan for $30. Pleading financial difficulty, the reporter holds him off with a $2 down-payment and departs. (read more...)

Naming the Virus, Becoming the Virus: Affective Forces of Threat from Hà Nội to Atlanta and the Possibility for Anti-Racist Solidarities

 Tiên-Dung Hà  July 6, 2021

“Chống dịch như chống giặc” (“Fight the pandemic like an invader”) has become Vietnam’s slogan in its battle against COVID-19. From the pandemic’s onset until April 2021, Vietnam performed exceptionally in halting the viral spread and preventing deaths from COVID-19. While COVID-19’s origin remains contested, Vietnam’s 1,306km border with China posed an acute risk during the first wave in early 2020. Defying odds, Vietnam kept the virus at bay. With a low case load and death count between Jan 2020 – June 2020, Vietnam stood out from its northern neighbor, China, as well as other European countries and the United States. Simply crediting Vietnam’s success to an authoritarian regime misses a deeper distrust of the Chinese government within Vietnam. This distrust stems from the historical colonization of China over Vietnam and imminent military and sovereignty threats posed in the East Sea (or the South China Sea) over the Spratly and Paracel Islands. (read more...)

Envisioning a Different Park: Border Walls, Transborder Ties, and Militarized Ecologies

 Manuel G. Galaviz  February 11, 2021

Este contenido está disponible en español aquí

When news broke out on January 20th, 2021, that newly inaugurated President Joe Biden signed a proclamation ending Trump’s Executive Order 9844, which declared a national emergency at the U.S. southern border, funneling emergency funds to construct his infamous border wall, immigrant rights activists and leaders rejoiced. Biden’s proclamation explicitly called to “pause work on each construction project on the southern border wall.” Yet, the next day, construction crews replacing the existing 18-foot border fence with the 30-foot rusted steel border wall between San Diego and Tijuana carried on with business as usual. (read more...)

The Work it Takes to Stop Working: Productivity in Labs and Sugarcane

 Katie Ulrich  November 9, 2020

In spring of 2020, thousands of scientific labs across several continents shut down. What was deemed “non-essential” research was ramped down and/or paused in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus, and in some cases direct resources to Covid-19 research instead. Speaking with scientist friends and interlocutors in both Brazil, where I was carrying out research, and the US, where I’m from and have worked in labs myself, there was much discussion about what work to do in the meantime to continue progressing theses, dissertations, and research projects—in other words, to maintain productivity. On Twitter, numerous threads under the hashtag #phdlife offered advice and encouragement to “scientists without a lab,” as one graphic put it: (read more...)

STS and Electoral Politics

 Baird Campbell, Caitlyn Dye, Daria Savchenko, Hélène Mialet, Jessica Lauren Bray, Maria Vidart-Delgado, Nell Haynes, Tim Quinn  August 17, 2020

In the context of the upcoming US presidential election and increasing evidence of the importance of voting infrastructure, this week we revisit past posts that highlight the key role STS must play in these conversations. (read more...)