The local roots of 'health for all': Primary health care in practices, 1950s-2000s.

We look at Universal Health Coverage (UHC) through a historical investigation of the "health for all by 2000" policy adopted by the WHO in 1978. Within contemporary debates on access to care, Alma Ata is usually considered as a brief moment of well-intentioned utopia, which buckled to global health's agenda of performance metrics and targeted diseases. Such visions of primary health care (PHC) are shared references in the debates about UHC.

Interrogating the World Bank's role in global health knowledge production, governance, and finance.

Background: In the nearly half century since it began lending for population projects, the World Bank has become one of the largest financiers of global health projects and programs, a powerful voice in shaping health agendas in global governance spaces, and a mass producer of evidentiary knowledge for its preferred global health interventions. How can social scientists interrogate the role of the World Bank in shaping 'global health' in the current era?

Main Body: As a group of historians, social scientists, and public health officials with experience studying the effects of the institution's investment in health, we identify three challenges to this research. First, a future research agenda requires recognizing that the Bank is not a monolith, but rather has distinct inter-organizational groups that have shaped investment and discourse in complicated, and sometimes contradictory, ways.

Changing the scale: slides and electron microscopy at the Virus Laboratory of the Pasteur Institute.

Slides are material objects, the daily existence of which cannot be diassociated from the practice of microscopy. But what happens to slides when the examination tool is no longer an optical apparatus but an electon microscope? This is the core issue this paper examines. The answer it proposes is that electron microscope slides are not slides in the classical sense of the word but complex arrangements of materials including plates, cards, photographs and notebooks, which constitute an imaginary "slide," an assemblage the status and existence of which is defined in reference to the heritage of optical microscopy.

New wine in old bottles? The biotechnology problem in the history of molecular biology.

This paper examines the "biotechnology problem" in the history of molecular biology, namely the alleged reinvention of a basic academic discipline looking for the logic of life, into a typical technoscientific enterprise, closely related to agriculture, medicine, and the construction of markets. The dominant STS model sees the roots of this shift in a radical change of the regime of knowledge production. The paper argues that this scheme needs to be historicized to take into account the past in our biotech present.

Exoteric knowledge and esoteric knowledge. Ludwik Fleck, pedigrees and the visualization of pathological heredity.

In Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, Ludwik Fleck uses the concept of an "ideogram" to designate the representation of a thought style through an image, which condenses its features in graphic properties. Pedigrees are such ideograms used by scientists and health professionals on the one hand, patients and lay persons on the other hand. Building on Fleck's analysis of the relationships between esoteric circles and exoteric circles, this paper traces the transformation and uses of pedigrees in 20th century medicine.

Normal pathways: controlling isotopes and building biomedical research in postwar France.

During the late 1940s and 1950s, radioisotopes became important resources for biological and medical research. This article explores the strategies used by French researchers to get access to this material, either from the local Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) or from suppliers in the United States or United Kingdom. It focuses on two aspects of this process: the transatlantic circulation of both isotopes and associated instrumentation; the regulation of use and access by the administrative bodies governing research in France.

Better prepared than synthesized: Adolf Butenandt, Schering Ag and the transformation of sex steroids into drugs (1930-1946).

This paper follows the trajectory of sex steroids in 1930s Germany as a way to investigate the system of research which characterized the development of these drugs. Analyzing the changing relationship between the pharmaceutical company Schering and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute für Biochemie headed by Nobel Prize winner Adolf Butenandt, the paper highlights the circulation of materials, information and money as much as the role of patents in shaping the study of sex steroids. Semi-synthetic analogs and metabolic pathways thus emerged as shared bio-industrial assets.

Hormone replacement therapy, cancer, controversies, and women's health: historical, epidemiological, biological, clinical, and advocacy perspectives.

Routine acceptance of use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) was shattered in 2002 when results of the largest HRT randomised clinical trial, the women's health initiative, indicated that long term use of oestrogen plus progestin HRT not only was associated with increased risk of cancer but, contrary to expectations, did not decrease, and may have increased, risk of cardiovascular disease. In June 2004 a group of historians, epidemiologists, biologists, clinicians, and women's health advocates met to discuss the scientific and social context of and response to these findings. It was found that understanding the evolving and contending knowledge on hormones and health requires: (1) considering its societal context, including the impact of the pharmaceutical industry, the biomedical emphasis on individualised risk and preventive medicine, and the gendering of hormones; and (2) asking why, for four decades, since the mid-1960s, were millions of women prescribed powerful pharmacological agents already demonstrated, three decades earlier, to be carcinogenic? Answering this question requires engaging with core issues of accountability, complexity, fear of mortality, and the conduct of socially responsible science.

Molding national research systems: the introduction of penicillin to Germany and France.

In our historical imagination, penicillin plays the role of the good sister of the atomic bomb. It epitomizes the success of the U.S.