Clinical trials and venture tribulations: Stem cell research and the making of Vietnamese bio-entrepreneurs

Abstract

The article is concerned with biomedical technologies and the entrepreneurial ways through which these vital technologies come to life. Focusing on stem cell ‘clinical trials’ conducted in hospitals in Việt Nam, it traces the processes through which tentative experiments and uncertain results are being translated into commercial ventures. It pays particular attention to the complex institutional settings and collaborative engagements through which biomedical enterprise and markets come to be instituted. Of particular concern are network partnerships involving public bodies, policymakers and private business interests that facilitate the process of turning clinical experiments into vetted therapies for the healthcare marketplace. The article contributes to anthropological reflections on emerging bioscience economic formations that are widely termed as ‘bioeconomies’. It does so, by reorienting the analytical gaze away from understandings of economic value as inherently rooted in biological substances that hold a future promise of cure, towards ongoing processes of assembling biomedical entrepreneurial networks and turning biotechnical matters into commodities.

European social anthropology in 2018: an increasingly recursive public

“…What distinguishes recent work, however, is how it tends to posit an empirically discernible breakdown in a whole series of traditional boundaries between academic knowledge production on the one hand and knowledge practices unfolding in both ‘the field’ and the wider political economies in which academia has always been embedded on the other. At a time when anthropologists are increasingly evaluated in terms of ‘impact’ metrics (Andersson ; Stein 2018) and project management ontologies that demand certain classes of deliverables , they increasingly encounter similarly responsibilised broker‐entrepreneurs in their various field sites (Marouda ). Yet the convergence of anthropologists and their objects of study is not just the result of downward social mobility for anthropologists coinciding with a long‐overdue broadening of the anthropological gaze to include what Laura Nader () once called ‘studying up’ (Gilbert P ; Gilbert and Sklair ; Glucksberg ; Salverda and Skovgaard‐Smith ; Sklair ).…”