By Steven Epstein

Within the brief, turbulent heritage of AIDS study and remedy, the bounds among scientist insiders and lay outsiders were crisscrossed to a point by no means ahead of visible in scientific historical past. Steven Epstein's astute and readable research makes a speciality of the serious query of "how simple task is developed or deconstructed," top us throughout the perspectives of clinical researchers, activists, coverage makers, and others to find how wisdom approximately AIDS emerges out of what he calls "credibility struggles."Epstein exhibits the level to which AIDS examine has been a social and political phenomenon and the way the AIDS stream has reworked biomedical examine practices via its capability to garner credibility via novel concepts. Epstein unearths that nonscientist AIDS activists have won adequate of a voice within the medical international to form NIH-sponsored learn to a extraordinary quantity. a result of blurring of roles and duties, the construction of biomedical wisdom approximately AIDS doesn't, he says, stick to the pathways universal to technology; certainly, AIDS study can merely be understood as a box that's surprisingly wide, public, and contested. He concludes by way of interpreting fresh strikes to democratize biomedicine, arguing that even supposing AIDS activists have set the level for brand spanking new demanding situations to clinical authority, all social routine that search to democratize services face strange difficulties.Avoiding polemics and accusations, Epstein presents a benchmark account of the AIDS epidemic to this point, person who can be as invaluable to activists, coverage makers, and normal readers as to sociologists, physicians, and scientists.

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Additional resources for Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Medicine & Society)

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With the aid of electron microscopy, the Pasteur group also succeeded in photographing viral particles. When Montagnier contacted Gallo in early 1982 and informed him of his findings, Gallo encouraged him to submit his paper to Science , so that Gallo's, Essex's, and Montagnier's papers could all appear together. Since Science allows its authors to suggest appropriate peer reviewers, Gallo told Montagnier he would be happy to review the Pasteur Institute;s findings for the magazine. In his comments to Science , Gallo urged rapid publication, stressing the importance of Montagnier's work.

A central player was Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, a South African-born physician and researcher. A specialist in infectious diseases, Sonnabend had also done research in England on the drug interferon, put in a stint at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine as an assistant professor of microbiology, and served as the director of venereal disease control for the New York City Department of Health. [62] Sonnabend had little inclination toward simple, monocausal models of illness. "[63] Writing in the Native in September 1982, Sonnabend sought support for his views by warning his readers that endorsement of the viral hypothesis could result in antigay discrimination and prejudice: "To publicly propose that any minority group carries a specific infectious agent capable of causing severe immunodeficiency and cancer is an act of tremendous seriousness.

And to whom have we relinquished it? "[83] In the absence of a cure for AIDS, or even an agreed upon cause—and in the aftermath of an initial scientific framing of AIDS as a "gay disease" linked to promiscuity, a formulation that aroused the wrath of many in gay and lesbian communities—the credibility of doctors, ― 65 ― biomedical researchers, and public health authorities suffered greatly in those communities. Increasingly gays were prompted to respond by insisting on their own right to intervene—to weigh the evidence, pass judgment, and remind the medical establishment at every pass whose lives were really on the line.

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