CENTER FOR SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY
& MEDICINE STUDIES
(ST&MS)

The Center for Science Technology and Medicine Studies (ST&MS) is an interdisciplinary, multi-campus center for the study of Science, Technology and Medicine, located within the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The group brings together historians, sociologists, and anthropologists and others from the UCSF and UC Berkeley campuses who share an interest in understanding and analyzing the global historical, cultural, and social dynamics of the relationships among scientific research, technological developments and medical endeavors.

The center recognizes the increasing importance of social science scholarship on this topic as well as the urgent need for training more scholars in interdisciplinary methods that can make sense of the powerful roles of sciences and technologies in medical settings the world over. While many participants in this center continue to conduct research mostly within their discipline, we all recognize that new disciplinary and methodological formations within the health sciences require disciplinary and methodological innovations in the humanities and social sciences that study them. Just as the biomedical sciences have recognized a need to combine scientific fields (from physics to evolutionary genetics), so too are social scientists compelled to work interdisciplinarily to apprehend the cultural, social, and material basis of the dramatic changes brought about by biotechnology and other technoscientific fields.

The ST&MS center offers a unique combination of methodological skills and topical interests. Other programs in science and technology studies generally consist of sociologists, philosophers, political scientists and historians who focus on non-medical subjects. The ST&MS center brings cultural anthropologists into a central role in the study of modern biomedical sciences and technologies, in association with historians, sociologists, and others. Whereas most existing science and technology studies programs in the country focus on Euro-American settings, the ST&MS center emphasizes the development of biomedical sciences, technologies and especially biotechnology in global contexts, investigating the transnational patterning of the new economies of science and medicine. The center provides opportunities for collaboration among an international network of scholars and centers around the world, particularly in countries where there already exists a vibrant and engaged intellectual interest in science and technology studies. One specific area of geographic focus is on the Pacific Rim, and a network of such scholars and centers of research has begun to develop.

In addition to bringing together scholars who share intellectual interests, the center serves as a resource base for the graduate programs in several departments. At UCSF, these include the graduate programs in 1) Medical Anthropology , 2) History of Health Sciences , and 3) Sociology. The center attracts graduate students interested in an interdisciplinary course of study and helps to consolidate and coordinate faculty interests in these fields in and through the respective graduate programs. By serving on joint committees, sponsoring conferences, and participating in ongoing seminars, the ST&MS center facilitates scholarly collaboration and enhanced graduate training across fields. The ST&MS center serves as a matrix for further multi-campus program-building and assists in garnering extramural grant support for funding and recruitment of doctoral and post-doctoral fellows and faculty, including visiting faculty.

The ST&MS center is a response to major changes in the organization, procedures and outcomes of biomedical science and biotechnology, most of which have not yet been studied by scholars in the humanities and social sciences. These developments include:

• The massive expansion of research in biotechnology, molecular biology and information technology / medical informatics
• Increasing commercialization of research
• Demands for evidence-based medicine and public health, with the rise of epidemiological and statistical reasoning, and surveillance medicine
• Development of medical treatments for "at risk" populations, and the commodification of health
• A refocusing of the biomedical research enterprise on the Asia-Pacific region
• The development of global career structures and transnational research projects in biomedical sciences, medical technology development and biotechnology, as well as in clinical research
• The increasing importance of managed care and bureaucratic organization in clinical medicine, utilizing computer science and rationalizing service delivery
• The transformation of bodies and identities through the incorporation of technologies, transplantation, etc., and the development of biosocial technoscientific identities revealed only through scientific means
• Competition from other health care modalities and the rise of patient advocacy, including transnational patient movements. We are especially interested in how these developments in the intellectual content, technological resources and economic functions of biomedicine articulate with one another, and the problems of translating innovations in one field into practice in another.

Biomedicine in the industrialized world is increasingly dominated by biotechnology research and entrepreneurial economies of profit, with a growing emphasis on molecular biology and information technologies. This raises urgent new research questions about the social and cultural consequences of emerging scientific constellations. Taken-for-granted boundaries between, for example, human and animal species, biological forms, cultural groups, and even the possibility of a bounded self and body, are rapidly undermined at the same time that they become increasingly important in the social worlds and economic markets in which they are embedded. Similarly, the structures of scientific medical research are changing profoundly, from the ever specializing microdomains of the molecular laboratory to global populations and transnational epidemic crises that are ever more frequently appearing on the medical map. Finally, the traditional intellectual boundaries between academia, private industry and corporate sponsorship have become permeable, allowing entirely new organizational, philosophical and economic configurations. Such transformations demand grounded historical, cultural and social research and analyses that can identify the cultural and social politics of their impacts and possibilities. A few of the areas of research interest of the current faculty include:

• Development of international health services
• Postcolonial Science and Technology
• Authorship and ownership in biomedical research
• History and health policy
• Health Development and Technological Democracy
• Feminist Critiques of Science and Technologies
• Scientific Research and Multiculturalism
• Race and the Politics of Medical Science
• The Bioeconomy and Genomics in Global Perspective
• Biomedicalization as a History of the Present
• Biosociality and Informatics in Medicine
• EthicsUnder Regimes of Technical Possibility
• Technology, Social Inequality and Structural Violence (at home and abroad)
• The Political Economy of Science and Medicine
• Reproductive Sciences and Technologies