CANCELLED: Charlotte Brives (Centre Emile Durkheim, Bordeaux), The promises of phage therapy

This event is cancelled.

Charlotte Brives (Centre Emile Durkheim, Sciences Po Bordeaux, France)

The promises of phage therapy, or why phages are such an interesting object for anthropologists.

Abstract
Phage therapy, the use of bacteriophage viruses to treat human bacterial infections, is a century-old practice developed in 1917 by Félix d’Hérelle. After an expansion phase, however, its use declined in Western Europe and the United States from the 1930s onwards. For several years, faced with the emergence of bacterial multi- or even toti-resistant to antibiotics, there has been a desire on the part of various players to see this therapy develop again. The decline and re-emergence of a very particular therapy that makes use of dynamic biological entities is a particularly interesting phenomenon for anthropology. This presentation will be an opportunity to present certain elements on the way biomedical knowledge is produced and used and to better question their underlying representations and conceptions (of the world, health, disease, relationships to other species). We will also see how these concepts, far from being neutral, cut across fields as diverse as science, law, or economics, and how they impose on public health practices and choices.

Charlotte Brives (chargée de recherche, CNRS) is specialized in anthropology of science and anthropology of medicine.