Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill PDF

Rating: (4 reviews) Author: Gabriela Soto Laveaga ISBN : 9780822346050 New from $10.00 Format: PDF

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In the 1940s chemists discovered that barbasco, a wild yam indigenous to Mexico, could be used to mass-produce synthetic steroid hormones. Barbasco spurred the development of new drugs, including cortisone and the first viable oral contraceptives, and positioned Mexico as a major player in the global pharmaceutical industry. Yet few people today are aware of Mexico’s role in achieving these advances in modern medicine. In Jungle Laboratories, Gabriela Soto Laveaga reconstructs the story of how rural yam pickers, international pharmaceutical companies, and the Mexican state collaborated and collided over the barbasco. By so doing, she sheds important light on a crucial period in Mexican history and challenges us to reconsider who can produce science.

Soto Laveaga traces the political, economic, and scientific development of the global barbasco industry from its emergence in the 1940s, through its appropriation by a populist Mexican state in 1970, to its obsolescence in the mid-1990s. She focuses primarily on the rural southern region of Tuxtepec, Oaxaca, where the yam grew most freely and where scientists relied on local, indigenous knowledge to cultivate and harvest the plant. Rural Mexicans, at first unaware of the pharmaceutical and financial value of barbasco, later acquired and deployed scientific knowledge to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies, lobby the Mexican government, and ultimately transform how urban Mexicans perceived them. By illuminating how the yam made its way from the jungles of Mexico, to domestic and foreign scientific laboratories where it was transformed into pills, to the medicine cabinets of millions of women across the globe, Jungle Laboratories urges us to recognize the ways that Mexican peasants attained social and political legitimacy in the twentieth century, and positions Latin America as a major producer of scientific knowledge.

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press Books (December 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822346052
• ISBN-13: 978-0822346050
• Product Dimensions: 0.9 x 5.9 x 8.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill PDF

Jungle Laboratories is an engaging and fascinating study of a non-traditional commodity, barbasco. Clearly written and carefully researched, this book shows us the multiple ways in which transnational pharmaceutical companies' demand eventually transformed living and working conditions in the Mexican countryside. The book provides a unique window into the history of post-revolutionary Mexico, and it is a very accessible reading not only for students and academics but also for people interested in the historical interplay of science, states, and local communities. My students and I have always enjoyed reading and discussing Jungle Laboratories, and I highly recommend it.

By angela vergara

I used it in a class on commodities. Students liked the first 5 chapters and not the last 4. I think the story is unique compared to other standards on things like sugar or tobacco.

I think the reviewer (anahuac) that points out that this is a great story but needed some editing for clarity (and I would add brevity) is on the money.

The reviewer (vergara) that loved the book so much (also a UC San Diego grad - like the author ...) is right on the money about the research.

By Mesa Verde