AO: The analyst noted that “the multidimensional approach to collaboration at NCI was at the same time innovative in its ability to unite academia, industry, andgovernment science in short-term voluntarist collaborations and consonant with the approach to translational research NCI administrators hoped to foster.” (10)
AO: The analyst notes the specific interviews she held in her foot notes as well as archival materials cited such as meeting minutes and government reports. She does not talk about where she stored her own data.
AO: A researcher who cares about their science contributing towards "social good"
AO: The analyst focused on private-public partnerships in the research and development of pharmaceuticals.
AO: The analyst looks at the values of serving the “public good” that were fulfilled through the development of HPV vaccines by US government scientists.
AO: The analyst noted the importance of collaboration because of need for interdisciplinary knowledges to tackle the problem: “Schiller and Lowy’s absence of formal training in either vaccinology or clinical trial design, and the NCI’s lack of experience in producing biologicals, created barriers that necessitated collaboration outside of their laboratory” (9).
AO: The analyst notes that there has been a shift towards neoliberal regimes of science policy and that scientists at government research centers perceive industry’s private R&D as undermining the public good.
AO: The analyst argued that “It is difficult to argue that NCI scientists were motivated by concerns for profit, as federal technology transfer policy capped all NIH employees’ royalties at US$100,000 annually at the time they patented their technology” (5).
AO: The analyst decried the “conjectures of technical, organizational, and institutional environments” that made it implausible for alternatives to industry developed HPV vaccines to be developed on the same time horizon (regarless of how seriously NCI researchers took the social aims of global disease reduction.” (17).
AO: The analyst cites STS work that has been concerned with the translational research that makes medical discoveries in the lab turn into medical interventions at the bedsite.
AO: The analyst mentions discussions of “efficacy” as shaping the conversations about the production of the HPV vaccine. Some authors cited argued that if scientists been instilled with “social aims of efficiency in disease reduction” rather than “clincal trial efficacy”, scientists could have drawn from a universe of possible vaccine technologies that were cheaper, shelf-stable, and thus more likely to reduce the burden of cervical cancer among the poor (4). Analyst argues that historical evidence suggests that the NCI scientists responsible for the basic research that developed the vaccine did not ignore efficiency for the sake of efficacy and actually actively strove to balance efficacy with efficiency.
AO: The analyst is interested in understanding motivations for the development of HPV vaccines if profit is not the only answer.
AO: The analyst provides detailed accounting of the history of the HPV vaccine and highlights the need for such understands in order to better understand more concretely the possibilities for “ethical action” as they inhere in lived historical events. In other words, the analyst calls for “situated ethics” that account for the economic and legal infrastructures that shape what is or isn’t possible. She is pushing back against the idea that pharmaceutical R&D scientists are only motivated by profit. However, her argument would be strengthened by greater ethnographic detail about what it is that exactly drives scientists to do what they do, i.e. the nano and deutero level of analysis. Her analysis largely focuses on the macro.