An Opportunity to put the Country on the Research Map: Place and South African Drug Discovery

Abstract

This paper draws on ethnographic research that I began in 2010 at a small startup pharmaceutical company in the outskirts of Johannesburg, called iThemba Pharmaceuticals, which was founded in 2009 with the mission of finding new drugs for TB, HIV, and malaria (Pollock 2014). In this paper, I will focus how iThemba's project was articulated through multiple metaphorical and literal senses of the map. The name “iThemba” means “hope,” and although these hopes went unrealized, the company's story remains a rich one for consideration of the possibilities and challenges of innovation, transformation, and sustainability in Africa. In interviews, scientists talked about iThemba providing “an opportunity to put the country on the research map.” Moreover, for the scientific staff comprising black, white, and Asian South Africans as well as (black) Africans from neighboring countries, iThemba's mission held a promise of putting the continent of Africa “on the map.” The logo of iThemba incorporated a map of Africa. This rhetoric might be dismissed, on many grounds: South Africa is a highly problematic stand-in for the continent as a whole; iThemba's Afro-centric logo was designed in the UK; the company's scientific advisory board included European and American experts. As Achille Mbembe (2001, 242) has argued, discourses on Africa always have “their nature, their stakes, and their functions situated elsewhere.” Yet for the scientists working at iThemba, the rhetoric of hope for Africa was also real. To draw on James Ferguson's (2006) evocative phrasing, the project was understood as a way to renegotiate Africa's “place in the world.” The map is also importantly literal. In iThemba's work, the importance of space and distance was both palpable and reconfigured. South Africa shares a time zone with Europe, and the ability of European scientists to speak to South African scientists during the day was framed as a significant competitive advantage for contract chemistry work and collaboration. This capacity for virtual connection collapses some distance between north and south. Additionally, the ongoing legacies of (settler) colonial maps continue to shape South African scientific capacity. In an international science system in which “peripheries [are] defined not geographically but in terms of scientific authority and social power” (Chambers and Gillespie 2000, 231), Africa is not undifferentiated periphery. South Africa has well-regarded universities that produce many scientists, an intellectual property environment that protects producers, an effective transportation infrastructure – for industry if not for the country's population – including by air, water, and road. At the same time, South Africa's geographic isolation from concentrations of the pharmaceutical industry poses real material constraints. Intellectual property can exist in abstract forms, but in order to become drugs, it must be materialized with ingredients and processes that are unevenly distributed in space. The delays in delivery of reagents slow down South African pharmaceutical research capacity relative to other developing countries, such as India and China, with more robust pharmaceutical sectors. Challenges of securing supplies of reagents underscore the materiality of pharmaceuticals from the perspective of their developers, and the significance of material distribution in space.