{"title":"1. From Urine to Ampoule: The Commodity Chain of a Hormone","authors":"Urine TO Ampoule","doi":"10.1515/9781501758201-004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501758201-004","url":null,"abstract":"“Are you going to be a mother?” (Āpni ki mā hate calechen?) This question was inscribed on a billboard captured in a slightly blurred photograph that Mr. Velden was showing me in his living room in a small town in the Nether lands. It was part of a photo album depicting his visits to India. As a former repre sentative of a biochemical company, Mr. Velden had overseen a urine collection program in Kolkata. The billboard in the photograph had been erected close to the entrance of the company grounds in the outskirts of the city. Its inscrip tion invited pregnant women to help their infertile contemporaries by donating urine, which contains human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). The semipro cessed urine would then be transported by air to Oss, an industrial town in the Netherlands, where Mr. Velden’s company purified it to manufacture a phar maceutical that was sold internationally for infertility management. Tracing hCG’s “commodity chain” (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1986) between the 1960s and 1990s allows me to explore the alchemy of this hormone from a seemingly impotent waste product in Kolkata to a productive pharmaceutical commodity in the Netherlands.1 Or as Bruno Lunenfeld, a scientist who was instrumental in this field (see below), put it: hCG’s transformation from “urine into gold” (quoted in Livneh 2002). This alchemy was facilitated by promises of produc tivity that made the fertility of the urban poor in the global South available and valuable for reproductive medicine in the global North. In this chapter, I explore in detail the conditions of possibility that enabled the making of hCG, not only as a pharmaceutical but also as an important","PeriodicalId":367803,"journal":{"name":"Substantial Relations","volume":"128 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122648377","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"4. The Clinic and Beyond: Reproductive Temporalities","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9781501758201-007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501758201-007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":367803,"journal":{"name":"Substantial Relations","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121978035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"2. From Dismissal to Recognition: A Contested Claim","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9781501758201-005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501758201-005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":367803,"journal":{"name":"Substantial Relations","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130752533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"3. From Hobby to Industry: How IVF Diversified","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/9781501758201-006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501758201-006","url":null,"abstract":"On a pleasant afternoon, I met Dr. Indira Hinduja in her well-established private hospital in one of Mumbai’s affluent neighborhoods. She was part of the team that had produced India’s first “scientifically documented test-tube baby,” born on August 6, 1986. The project was headed by Dr. Anand Kumar, then director of the Institute of Research in Reproduction (IRR) who later publicized Dr. Subhas’s claim. In addition to the IRR, the public King Edward Memorial (KEM) Hospital took part in the project. Located in Parel, a former working-class neighborhood in Mumbai that used to house employees of the city’s textile mills, KEM Hospital opened its doors in 1926. A few hundred meters from its colonial structure, hustled into a small lane, stands the modern building of the IRR (today the National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health). Founded under the Directorate of Family Planning of the Government of India in 1954, from 1963 onward the institute has been governed by the Indian Council of Medical Research and entered into a partnership with KEM Hospital to “conduct application-oriented research” (National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health, n.d.). Further, the IRR’s initial focus on family planning has broadened over the years, particularly since the “beginning of the twenty-first cen tury when the institute decided to adopt [a] more holistic approach towards repro ductive health” (National Institute for Research in Reproductive Health, n.d.). During the 1980s, Dr. Hinduja was associated with both public institutions: she worked as a gynecologist at KEM Hospital and also became a PhD student at IRR. She remembered how she had to organize her scientific work around clini cal duties in the hospital while conducting research on IVF: “Pickups [egg cell","PeriodicalId":367803,"journal":{"name":"Substantial Relations","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121524106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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