Straight outta the tropics: pathological features of techno-scientific promises in neglected tropical disease research

Abstract

To gain support, scientific and technological promises need to be credible and address legitimate issues. This article explores this production of legitimacy and credibility that sustains techno-scientific promises in neglected tropical disease research, a group of infectious diseases that affect one billion individuals globally but remain largely excluded from the scope of the pharmaceutical industry. Specifically, I examine the dynamics of techno-scientific promises and expectations by focusing on Chagas disease research in Argentina, where neglected tropical diseases have been deemed legitimate objects of research efforts but, at the same time, they depend on international connections with high-profile stakeholders to become credible. However, in a context marked by the rise of global health organizations and the recent engagement of the pharmaceutical industry, these kinds of commitments to research and development to fight against neglected tropical diseases have resulted in three distinct “pathological features” or mismatches in their structures of expectations: the asymmetry between beneficiaries and scientific and technological decision-makers; the affected populations’ inability to invest in the hopes and expectations embodied in potential healthcare technologies; and the performative effects of techno-scientific promises, whereby leading solutions for neglected tropical diseases align with the rule of mainstream technoscience but hold only rhetorical continuity with formulations of the problem that originate in public health policies and discourse.