Suchergebnisse

En 1966, Georges Canguilhem estimait important de faire clairement la distinction entre l'objet naturel, celui que la science utilise comme prétexte, l'objet de la science qui est un produit culturel, et l'objet spécifique de l'histoire des sciences qui ne devait en aucun cas être confondu avec l'objet de la science. L'article « Pour une histoire sociale et culturelle des sciences » illustre le réel renouveau des méthodes employées pour construire l'objet de l'histoire des sciences. Paradoxalement, bien qu'il mette nettement en évidence l'élargissement des pratiques disciplinaires, cet article peut donner l'impression que les personnes, les événements et les sites récemment étudiés diffèrent peu de ceux privilégiés par les historiens des sciences de la génération précédente.

International audience ; The claim that anti‐malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, can cure COVID‐19 became a focus of fierce political battles that pitted promoters of these pharmaceuticals, Presidents Bolsonaro and Trump among them, against "medical elites." At the center of these battles are different meanings of effectiveness in medicine, the complex role of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in proving such effectiveness, the task of medical experts and the state in regulating pharmaceuticals, patients' activism, and the collective production of medical knowledge. This article follows the trajectory of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as anti‐COVID‐19 drugs, focusing on the reception of views of their main scientific promoter, the French infectious disease specialist, Didier Raoult. The surprising career of these drugs, our text proposes, is fundamentally a political event, not in the narrow sense of engaging specific political fractions, but in the much broader sense of the politics of public participation in science.

International audience ; The claim that anti‐malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, can cure COVID‐19 became a focus of fierce political battles that pitted promoters of these pharmaceuticals, Presidents Bolsonaro and Trump among them, against "medical elites." At the center of these battles are different meanings of effectiveness in medicine, the complex role of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in proving such effectiveness, the task of medical experts and the state in regulating pharmaceuticals, patients' activism, and the collective production of medical knowledge. This article follows the trajectory of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as anti‐COVID‐19 drugs, focusing on the reception of views of their main scientific promoter, the French infectious disease specialist, Didier Raoult. The surprising career of these drugs, our text proposes, is fundamentally a political event, not in the narrow sense of engaging specific political fractions, but in the much broader sense of the politics of public participation in science.

The claim that anti‐malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, can cure COVID‐19 became a focus of fierce political battles that pitted promoters of these pharmaceuticals, Presidents Bolsonaro and Trump among them, against "medical elites." At the center of these battles are different meanings of effectiveness in medicine, the complex role of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in proving such effectiveness, the task of medical experts and the state in regulating pharmaceuticals, patients' activism, and the collective production of medical knowledge. This article follows the trajectory of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as anti‐COVID‐19 drugs, focusing on the reception of views of their main scientific promoter, the French infectious disease specialist, Didier Raoult. The surprising career of these drugs, our text proposes, is fundamentally a political event, not in the narrow sense of engaging specific political fractions, but in the much broader sense of the politics of public participation in science.

International audience ; The claim that anti‐malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, can cure COVID‐19 became a focus of fierce political battles that pitted promoters of these pharmaceuticals, Presidents Bolsonaro and Trump among them, against "medical elites." At the center of these battles are different meanings of effectiveness in medicine, the complex role of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in proving such effectiveness, the task of medical experts and the state in regulating pharmaceuticals, patients' activism, and the collective production of medical knowledge. This article follows the trajectory of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as anti‐COVID‐19 drugs, focusing on the reception of views of their main scientific promoter, the French infectious disease specialist, Didier Raoult. The surprising career of these drugs, our text proposes, is fundamentally a political event, not in the narrow sense of engaging specific political fractions, but in the much broader sense of the politics of public participation in science.

In his early writings, the late Joseph Ben-David put forward a model accounting for certain kinds of cases of the emergence of new disciplines. We argue that Ben-David's explanations fall squarely within the sociology of knowledge — and, in fact, have many points in common with explanations in the tradition of the `strong programme' in that discipline. Specifically, Ben-David's central theoretical concept — that of `role hybridization' — overlaps the notion of `multifunctionality' of theories. Ben-David's approach is superior to that of the `strong programme' in as much as, being hermeneutical and not causal, it avoids the dangers usually besetting the sociology of knowledge — notably relativism. In the second part of the paper we analyze the emergence of Ludwik Fleck's ideas and — using Ben-David's model — we relate them to the social context within which Fleck was working. We show that social conditions induced the outsider bacteriologist Fleck to adopt a strategy of role-hybridization. This strategy gave rise to `idea-hybridizations' which led to his original, multifunctional theory of scientific growth.

The quasi-totality of social scientists who studied screening for cervical tumours identified such screening with a single method: the Pap smear (exfoliative cytology). This article explains that this method was not valid everywhere. The history of screening for cervical cancer in Brazil displays an alternative method for detecting cervical malignancies: a direct observation of the cervix with a specific instrument — the colposcope. The development of this method in Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s reflected a complex mixture of professional interests, government policies, and regional, local and charitable initiatives. While the use of colposcopy for cervical tumour screening was phased out in the 1970s and 1980s, the long lifespan and widespread diffusion of this method illuminates the irreducible contingency of specific developments in science, technology and medicine. Seen from the vantage point of Brazil, the Western model for preventing cervical malignancies no longer appears self-evident. Alternative choices might have led to the development of different material and visual cultures of medicine, stimulated different patterns of medical specialization and division of medical labour, produced different links between malignancies, women, gynaecologists, epidemiologists and public health experts, and shaped different health policies.