Decisions about drugs by doctors, patients, and the public depend on a complex framework of industry regulation, professional and public guidance, and transparent publication of the research on which the regulatory framework depends. In the UK, there are two agencies with a national role in this...

"Philanthro-capitalism: How charity became big business The charitable sector is one of the fastest-growing industries in the global economy. Nearly half of the more than 85,000 private foundations in the United States have come into being since the year 2000. Just under 5,000 more were...

Recent controversies over the safety of drugs such as Vioxx, a painkiller manufactured by Merck, and Seroxat, an SSRI antidepressant manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline, have led to a consequence that at first seems entirely positive: they have attracted more attention to the suppression of negative...

Philanthrocapitalism – the harnessing of pro-market strategies in order to increase returns on philanthropic investment – is starting to polarize opinions in the worlds of philanthropy, global health and development. With the term coined in just 2006, “philanthrocapitalism” has yet to...

In 2004, a former FDA medical officer named David Ross watched news coverage of one of the highest-profile pharmaceutical controversies in recent years: Merck’s withdrawal of Vioxx, its bestselling painkiller, from the global marketplace. At the time, David Ross railed to his wife about the...

This workshop, organised by InSIS, aimed to foster an exchange between different approaches in science and technology studies and political and economic sociology about the study of heterogeneous arrangements – assemblages in which economic relations are always entangled with political,...