Innovation and Biomedicine Ethics, Evidence and Expectation in HIV

Drawing on such process thinkers as Whitehead, Deleuze and Stengers, Innovation and Biomedicine develops a powerful framework for the analysis of Biomedical Innovation. With its sustained focus on the Pre-Exposure Prophylactic pill (PrEP) for the prevention of HIV infection, the volume explores the ethical, medical and political elements entailed in the pill's testing through offshore randomized control trials (RCTs). To this end, the key concept of 'eventuation' is elaborated and deployed in the scrutiny of the 'gold standard' status of RCTs, the role of ethics in RCTs, and the enactment of the PrEP pill as a singular entity. Further, the authors engage with affective, topological and virtual dimensions to show how PrEP's eventuation also allows for new scientific and ethical questions to be crafted. Innovation and Biomedicine is a major contribution to science and technology studies, medical sociology, and the multi-disciplinary study of HIV.

Mike Michael is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney, Australia. He has published widely with books including Science, Social Theory and Public Knowledge (with Alan Irwin), Technoscience and Everyday Life and Accummulation: The Material Politics of Plastic (co-edited with Jennifer Gabrys and Gay Hawkins).

Marsha Rosengarten is Reader and also the Director of the Unit of Play in the Sociology Department, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. She is the author of HIV Interventions: Biomedicine and the Traffic in Information and Flesh.

1. Setting a Scene
2. A Brief and Partial History of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) in the Context of HIV Prevention and Treatment.
3. Theory and Event: Approaching the Study of PrEP.
4. The Gold Standard: The Complex Singularity of PrEP, RCT and Bioethics
5. PrEPs, Multiplicity and the Qualification of Knowledge and Ethics
6. On Some Topologies of PrEP
7. Conclusion: Eventuating the Methodology of Trials