Elizabeth Siegel Watkins

How the Pill Became a Lifestyle Drug: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Birth Control in the United States Since 1960

Marketing decisions, rather than scientific innovations, have guided the development and positioning of contraceptive products in recent years. I review the stalled progress in contraceptive development in the decades following the advent of the Pill in 1960 and then examine the fine-tuning of the market for oral contraceptives in the 1990s and 2000s. Although birth control has been pitched in the United States as an individual solution, rather than a public health strategy, the purpose of oral contraceptives was understood by manufacturers, physicians, and consumers to be the prevention of pregnancy, a basic health care need for women. Since 1990, the content of that message has changed, reflecting a shift in the drug industrys view of the contraception business. Two factors contributed to bring about this change: first, the industrys move away from research and development in birth control and second, the growth of the class of medications known as lifestyle drugs.

Tracking Career Outcomes for Postdoctoral Scholars: A Call to Action

The oversupply of postdoctoral scholars relative to available faculty positions has led to calls for better assessment of career outcomes. Here, we report the results of a study of postdoctoral outcomes at the University of California, San Francisco, and suggest that institutions have an obligation to determine where their postdoc alumni are employed and to share this information with current and future trainees. Further, we contend that local efforts will be more meaningful than a national survey, because of the great variability in training environment and the classification of postdoctoral scholars among institutions. We provide a framework and methodology that can be adopted by others, with the goal of developing a finely grained portrait of postdoctoral career outcomes across the United States.

The future of graduate and postdoctoral training in the biosciences

This article summarizes the outcomes of the second national conference on the Future of Bioscience Graduate and Postdoctoral Training. Five topics were addressed during the conference: diversity in leadership positions; mentoring; modernizing the curriculum; experiential learning; and the need for better data on trainees. The goal of the conference was to develop a consensus around these five topics and to recommend policies that can be implemented by academic and research institutions and federal funding agencies in the United States.

The Vernacular of Risk — Rethinking Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Pharmaceuticals

Missing from the debate over proposed new rules for direct-to-consumer drug advertising is a broader perspective on the vernacular of risk, as something fundamental to the origins of the category of prescription drugs and their regulation over the past half-century.

The Social Construction of a Contraceptive Technology: An Investigation of the Meanings of Norplant

This essay looks at Norplant qua technology and uses analytic frameworks from the social construction of technology to explain the trajectory of its brief history. The author contend that there were multiple uses of Norplant, in terms of rhetorical strategies, symbolic representations, and contraceptive intentions, constructed by reproductive scientists, population control advocates, pharmaceutical manufacturers, doctors, birth control clinic staffers, government regulators, legislators, judges, women’s health activists, potential users, and actual users. However, while relevant social groups shaped the discourse surrounding Norplant in the 1990s, its ultimate fate was determined by choices made by potential users. At the ‘‘consumption junction’’ of the late twentieth-century contraceptive marketplace, American women ignored the meanings constructed for Norplant by developers, producers, providers, and policy makers and made their decisions based on what Norplant meant to them. Individuals’ decisions to choose other methods of preventing pregnancy coalesced into a collective rejection of this contraceptive technology.This essay looks at Norplant qua technology and uses analytic frameworks from the social construction of technology to explain the trajectory of its brief history. The author contend that there were multiple uses of Norplant, in terms of rhetorical strategies, symbolic representations, and contraceptive intentions, constructed by reproductive scientists, population control advocates, pharmaceutical manufacturers, doctors, birth control clinic staffers, government regulators, legislators, judges, women’s health activists, potential users, and actual users. However, while relevant social groups shaped the discourse surrounding Norplant in the 1990s, its ultimate fate was determined by choices made by potential users. At the ‘‘consumption junction’’ of the late twentieth-century contraceptive marketplace, American women ignored the meanings constructed for Norplant by developers, producers, providers, and policy makers and made their decisions based on what Norplant meant to them. Individuals’ decisions to c...

Live Longer Better: The Historical Roots of Human Growth Hormone as Anti-Aging Medicine

ABSTRACT:In recent years, historians have turned their attention to the emergence of anti-aging medicine, suggesting that this interest group coalesced in the wake of widespread availability of recombinant human growth hormone (HGH) after 1985. We take a longer view of modern anti-aging medicine, unearthing a nexus of scientific, medical, and cultural factors that developed over several decades in the twentieth century to produce circumstances conducive to the emergence of this medical sub-specialty established on the premise of the anti-aging effects of HGH. Specifically, we locate these roots in earlier hormone replacement therapies and in the so-called life extension movement. We reveal the continual tension between, on the one hand, champions of a mainstream medical specialty and a field of biomedical research that aimed to improve health for the aged and, on the other hand, advocates who campaigned for medical endeavors to preserve midlife health in perpetuity, and even to extend the human lifespan. We also demonstrate that the two groups shared a belief in science to solve – or at least to ameliorate – the problems of aging. This commitment to science has been the hallmark of twentieth and twenty-first century prescriptions for living life longer and better.

Finding Science in Surprising Places: Gender and the Geography of Scientific Knowledge. Introduction to ‘Beyond the Academy: Histories of Gender and Knowledge’

The essays in this special issue of Centaurus examine overlooked agents and sites of knowledge production beyond the academy and venues of industry- and government-sponsored research. By using gender as a category of analysis, they uncover scientific practices taking place in locations such as the kitchen, the nursery, and the storefront. Because of historical gendered patterns of exclusion and culturally derived sensibilities, the authors in this volume find that significant contributions to science were made in unexpected places and that these were often made by women. The shift in focus to these different sites and different actors broadens the spectrum of what counts as science and where science happens. That is, in moving beyond the parameters of formal academic structures, this special issue seeks to recast the ways in which the production of science itself is defined and to engage readers in the redesign of the boundaries of our discipline.

Radioactive fallout and emerging environmentalism: Cold war fears and public health concerns, 1954-1963

This essay considers the scientific, social, and political contexts of the debate over radioactive fallout. I contend that the growth of an environmental consensus in 1950s America was constrained both by the nature of the fallout debate and by the cultural climate in which it took place.