{"product_id":"jungle-laboratories-mexican-peasants-national-projects-and-the-making-of-the-pill-paperback","title":"Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, and the Making of the Pill - Paperback","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cp style=\"text-align: right;\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/reportcopyrightinfringement.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eReport copyright infringement\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003cp\u003eby \u003cb\u003eGabriela Soto Laveaga\u003c\/b\u003e (Author)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the 1940s chemists discovered that \u003ci\u003ebarbasco\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eJungle Laboratories\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSoto 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, \u003ci\u003eJungle Laboratories\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eBack Jacket\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this innovative and compelling book, Gabriela Soto Laveaga links together a host of phenomena crying out for attachment. Jungle Laboratories \"brings bioprospecting into conversation with Mexican nationalism; makes pharmaceutical development connect with campesinos striving for recognition as citizens and experts; locates the conjunction of contemporary bioscience and Latin American modernity; and finds the overgrown intersection of steroids and magical thinking--thereby giving us a ground-breaking postcolonial study of the roots of global biomedicine.\"--Warwick Anderson, author of \"Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eAuthor Biography\u003c\/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGabriela Soto Laveaga is Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.\u003c\/p\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eNumber of Pages:\u003c\/strong\u003e 352\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eDimensions:\u003c\/strong\u003e 0.9 x 9.1 x 6 IN\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eIllustrated:\u003c\/strong\u003e Yes\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePublication Date:\u003c\/strong\u003e February 01, 2010\u003c\/div\u003e\n            ","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52239357477138,"sku":"9780822346050","price":48.53,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0941\/2211\/5346\/files\/NEloOWJtWWNEM0hvdGNML2YvMGdFUT09.webp?v=1777876051","url":"https:\/\/ckbookstore.net\/products\/jungle-laboratories-mexican-peasants-national-projects-and-the-making-of-the-pill-paperback","provider":"CK BOOKSTORE","version":"1.0","type":"link"}