“From urine to ampoule” describes the commodity chain of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) over space and time. hCG is a pharmaceutical derived from the urine of pregnant women and used in infertility management. To supply the European pharmaceutical industry with biological raw material for the production of hCG, an extensive urine collection scheme was established among the urban poor in Kolkata in the 1970s. Fuelled by promises of productivity in terms of fertility and development, it received substantial support from the Indian state, despite a political-economic regime that was characterised by protectionism and “license raj” (license rule).

By tracing the outlines of these commodity chains from the 1970s to the 1990s, the presentation illustrates processes of valuation and concomitant dynamics of exclusion that turned urine into a medically and economically valuable product. It shows how the making of hCG relied on and forged unexpected, sometimes conflicting relations: between pregnant women in India, the pharmaceutical industry in Europe and patients of infertility clinics all over the world specifically; or between science, the market, the state and everyday lives more generally.

About the Speaker:

Sandra Bärnreuther is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich and an associate member at the “History of Knowledge” Centre in Zurich. She studied sociocultural anthropology and geography in Delhi (Delhi University), New York City (NYU), Munster, and Heidelberg. Dr Bärnreuther conducted 18 months of fieldwork on reproductive medicine in India for her PhD in sociocultural anthropology, awarded by the South Asia Institute and the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe” at the University of Heidelberg. She has also worked as a lecturer and researcher at the universities of Heidelberg and Frankfurt, spent time as a visiting student at Jawaharlal Nehru University (2011-2012) and the University of Edinburgh (2013), was a guest lecturer at the University of Chicago (2014) and a research fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Study (2016).