Physician, sociologist, and postdoctoral fellow Victor Roy (Yale School of Medicine) will be discussing his recently published book with University of California Press!
Capitalizing a Cure takes readers into the struggle over a medical breakthrough to investigate the power of finance over business, biomedicine, and public health. When curative treatments for hepatitis C launched in 2013, sticker shock over their prices intensified the global debate over access to new medicines. Weaving historical research with insights from political economy and science and technology studies, Victor Roy demystifies an oft-missed dynamic in this debate: the reach of financialized capitalism into how medicines are made, priced, and valued.
Roy’s account moves between public and private labs, Wall Street and corporate board rooms, and public health meetings and health centers to trace the ways in which curative medicines became financial assets dominated by strategies of speculation and extraction at the expense of access and care. Provocative and sobering, this book illuminates the harmful impact of allowing financial markets to determine who heals and who suffers and points to the necessary work of building more equitable futures.
Victor Roy will be in conversation with Amy Kapczynski (LPE Project Faculty Director & GHJP Faculty Co-Director) and Lenore Palladino (Assistant Professor of Economics and in the School of Public Policy at UMass Amherst).
If you would like to attend this event in person at Yale Law School (Sterling Law Building Room 120), please sign up here.
If you would like to attend this event via Zoom, please sign up here.
Sponsoring Organization(s)
LPE Project
GHJP