Spinning blood into gold: Science, sex work and HIV-2 in Senegal

Through ethnography, this dissertation chronicles how a West African variant of HIV, known as HIV-2, emerged as a knowable entity. It examines how a nation like Senegal, which exists at the margins of capitalism and the periphery of the biomedical knowledge empire, has come to occupy a central place in the trajectory of this "other" form of HIV. The dissertation draws upon scholarship from science studies to unweave the social and historical factors that created an environment in which HIV-2 became an object of scientific knowledge and practice. It also builds upon contributions from medical anthropologists whose work has elucidated the multiple ways that scientific facts, and the practices that produce them, accrue different meanings for the myriad actors engaged in their construction. The extension of bioscience into low-income settings has created new networks of scientific extraction, and with them, new configurations of power. By tracing the trajectory of Senegal's HIV-2 research apparatus, the dissertation demonstrates how global inequalities shape the avenues of scientific possibility in low-income nations such as Senegal.;Specifically, the dissertation examines how a group of female sex workers in Senegal have been transformed from a population of bodies-to-be-managed into a cohort of enormous scientific value. It traces the series of enrollment practices that have allowed the Senegalese state and local HIV researchers to gain access to their biological profiles for more than three decades. The social behavior, and more importantly, the blood of these women have been systematically analyzed and banked, creating a reserve of biological data that Senegal's researchers have referred to as "a gold mine." While home to such powerful scientific raw materials, in the absence of any meaningful internal research funding, Senegal's HIV-2 research program is exposed to the shifting priorities of international funders. The thesis takes HIV-2 seriously at a biological level, while also employing the virus as a useful lens for articulating the relationships between emerging forms of global power and the formulation of scientific truth.