Ilana Löwy
Biographic Data
| ID | 176304 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ilana Löwy |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ilana |
| FAMILY NAME | Löwy |
| SIGNATURE | LÖWY I |
| AFFILIATIONS | Inserm |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6963-0578 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 130 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 318 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 128 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The crisis in American science
The second regime of Donald J. Trump has decimated federal science and federally supported science to a greater degree than his first regime, unleashing an unprecedented crisis. The authors in this roundtable take a close look at the tortured landscape of science in America and, using historical scholarship and the tools of history, analyze and assess its plight. Topics include nuclear facilities, the role of Silicon Valley oligarchs, Executive O…
Viruses and Reproductive Injustice
Brazil's Zika outbreak revealed extreme health disparities and reproductive injustice across racial and socioeconomic lines. Brazil's 2015 Zika outbreak led to severe illnesses for many and the birth of several thousands of children with severe brain damage. Even though mosquito-borne diseases such as the Zika virus affect people across society, these children were born almost exclusively to poor, and usually non-white, women. In Viruses and Repr…
Absent data, diagnostic practices and the Zika conundrum
Dans sa présentation de l'atelier “Le déluge des données” Theodore Porter a expliqué que l'obstacle principal a la fusion des donnes médicaux des sources diverses est leur l'hétérogénéité : « toutefois il est possible de uniformiser des donnes a travers une régulation plus stricte. » L'étude de l'épidémie de Zika au Brésil (2015-2017) indique qu'une telle uniformisation peut être avant tout un problème politique. Zika est une maladie relativement…
Patients as knowledge partners in the context of complex chronic conditions
This article conveys how taking patient knowledge seriously can improve patient experience and further medical science. In clinical contexts related to infection-associated chronic conditions and other complex chronic illnesses, patient knowledge is often undervalued, even when clinicians have limited training in diagnosing and treating a particular condition. We argue that there are opportunities for clinicians and researchers to collaborate wit…
Careers of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as "miraculous" anti-Covid-19 drugs
In early January 2024, a widely publicized article in the journal Biomedicine and Pharmacology estimated that approximately 17,000 COVID-19 patients in France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and the US died as a result of hydroxychloroquine treatment. The publication of this article is a fitting closure to nearly three years of controversy about the possible use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. Repurposed in early 2020 as miracle a…
Long Covid, the unending pandemic
The article explores the complexity and current uncertainties concerning long COVID, an emerging nosological entity with vague contours and characterised by unpredictable and persistent symptoms and absence of 'objective diagnosis'. Based on accounts of the affected individuals and balancing the review of medical and journalistic literature on the subject, historical approach and ethnography, this work describes and analyses the policies of recog…
Covid longa, a pandemia que não terminou
O artigo explora a complexidade e as incertezas atuais sobre a covid longa, uma entidade nosológica emergente pós-covid-19, com contornos imprecisos e caracterizada por sintomas imprevisíveis e persistentes. Baseado em relatos de pessoas afetadas e equilibrando a revisão da literatura médica e jornalística sobre o tema, a história da ciência e a etnografia em saúde, o trabalho descreve e analisa as políticas de reconhecimento e de cuidado da doen…
« Si Fleck y est arrivé, je peux espérer y arriver aussi ! »
International audience
Un cancer infectieux ? Comment la mise en évidence du lien entre HPV et cancer du col a changé la perception de ce cancer et les pratiques de santé publique
International audience
Precision Medicine
In 2013, Hans Jörg Rheinberger proposed that Mendelian genetics and molecular biology were “scientific ideologies,” that is, for him they are systems of thought whose objects are hyperbolic; they are not, or not yet, in the realm of and not, or not yet, under the control of that system. This article proposes that precision medicine today is a scientific ideology and analyses the implications of this statement for historians of biology, genetics, …
Non-invasive prenatal testing
Imperfect diagnosis
When the Zika virus burst onto the international scene in the second half of 2015, the development of diagnostic tools was seen as an urgent global health priority. Diagnostic capacity was restricted to a small number of reference laboratories, and none of the few available molecular or serological tests had been validated for extensive use in an outbreak setting. In the early weeks of the crisis, key funders stepped in to accelerate research and…
The 1942 Massive Contamination of Yellow Fever Vaccine
In the late 1930s, the 17D vaccine against yellow fever was produced in record time. 17D was and is an excellent vaccine. Its rapid diffusion led, however, to several problems, the most important among them being the 1942 massive contamination of the vaccine distributed to the US Army by the hepatitis B virus. The US part of this story is relatively well-known, but its Brazilian part much less so. In 1940, scientists who were producing the 17D va…
Testing Covid-19 in Brazil
Since the first recorded case of COVID-19 on February 26, 2020, Brazil has seen an exponential growth in the number of cases and deaths. The national testing approach has been insufficient to correctly use this tool in the support of containing the epidemic in the country. In this communication, we discuss efforts and challenges to scale-up COVID-19 testing at the Brazilian Unified National Health System (SUS). This communication presents the ini…
Hidden Perils
COVID-19, a disease induced by SARS-CoV-2, became a worldwide pandemic while SARS, a disease induced by a closely related virus, SARS-CoV, was successfully contained. This is because COVID-19, unlike SARS, can be spread by people who do not display any symptoms of disease, either because they are in the early stages of the infection or because their infection remains clinically silent. This research article traces the complex history of the diagn…
Test, Test, Test
This article follows the introduction of COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) diagnostic tests in France. It shows how, at the intersection of science, medicine, politics, and policy-making, the test, trace, and isolate (TTI) strategy played out during the first months of the pandemic against a backcloth of multiple shortages. In so doing, the authors move beyond trite explanations (such as 'French public health's backwardness') to highlight …
La sociologie de l'ignorance de Amos Funkenstein et Adin Steinsaltz
Cet article introduit et met en contexte un essai, La sociologie de l’ignorance, publié en hébreu 1987 par deux historiens d’idées renommés, Amos Funkenstein et Adin Steinsatz. Cet ouvrage explique que l’idée d’un « savoir ouvert » accessible à tous est née dans deux traditions culturelle distinctes : la tradition hébraïque, avec une étude des textes sacrés sous forme d’une discussion collective, et la tradition grecque, avec le développement de …
Typhus in Buchenwald
Ludwik Fleck is known today primarily as pioneer in the social study of scientific knowledge. However, during World War II he was a prisoner in Buchenwald, where he and other prisoners produced a typhus vaccine for the Nazis, and where he witnessed murderous experiments on human beings. After WW2, Fleck was accused by one of the prisoners who had participated in the vaccine production at Buchenwald of collaborating, either deliberately or due to …
Meat Should Be Prescribed in Very Small Doses, Arsenic-like”. How Josephine Joteyko and Varia Kipiani Pioneered Medical Research to Improve Vegetarianism in 1906
This compilation is based on the original report on a clinical survey conducted in Brussels (1905-1906) by Josephine Joteyko and Varia Kipiani with 43 vegetarians. Having advanced expertise in physiology and experimentalism, Joteyko (with Lithuanian and Polish origins) and Kipiani (with Georgian origins) discussed their findings at the Congress of the Belgian Society for Vegetarianism in 1906. For both children and adults, females and males, rega…
The “Abortion Pill” Misoprostol in Brazil
In the aftermath of the introduction of severe restrictions on abortion in several US states, some activists have argued that providing widespread access to an abortive drug, misoprostol, will transform an induced abortion into a fully private act and therefore will empower women. In Brazil, where abortion is criminalized, the majority of women who wish to terminate an unwanted pregnancy already use the illegal, but easily accessible, misoprostol…
ART with PGD
Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) was developed to allow women/couples at risk of having a child with 'severe and incurable' hereditary disease to produce embryos through in-vitro fertilization, followed by implantation of embryos devoid of mutated genes, allowing the birth of children free of the pathology present in the family. This article examines the highly regulated practice of PGD in France, the highly deregulated practice of PGD in …
Abortion for fetal anomaly
Abortion is a highly polarizing topic. It is presented by its supporters as woman's right to decide whether she wished to be a mother in a specific moment of her life, and by its opponents as killing of a future (and for some an already existing) human being. The latter view is often presented as absolute and extemporal. Yet, in practice, attitudes towards state's control over the fate of embryos and fetuses are always situated. In France, conser…
Uncertainty in times of medical emergency
Uncertainty was a defining feature of the Brazilian Zika crisis of 2015-2016. The cluster of cases of neonatal microcephaly detected in the country's northeast in the second half of 2015, and the possibility that a new virus transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes was responsible for this new syndrome, created a deep sense of shock and confusion in Brazil and around the world. When in February 2016 the WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of Internatio…
Hydroxychloroquine Controversies
The claim that anti-malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, can cure COVID-19 became a focus of fierce political battles that pitted promoters of these pharmaceuticals, Presidents Bolsonaro and Trump among them, against "medical elites." At the center of these battles are different meanings of effectiveness in medicine, the complex role of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in proving such effectiveness, the task of medical experts and …
Interview
Interviewed by:Ana Carolina Vimieiro Gomes in May 2019
The Strength of Loose Concepts - Boundary Concepts, Federative Experimental Strategies and Disciplinary Growth
L'âge limite de la maternité
En France, l'assistance médicale à la procréation (AMP), est réservée aux couples composés d'une femme et d'un homme « en âge de procréer », une définition étrange, puisqu'il s'agit souvent d'individus, ne pouvant pas avoir d'enfants, et ce quel que soit leur âge. L'auteure étudie ici la détermination, nécessairement arbitraire, de « l'âge de procréer » des hommes et des femmes dans le cadre de l'accès à l'AMP, puis examine le traitement de l'inf…
Uncertainty in times of medical emergency
Uncertainty was a defining feature of the Brazilian Zika crisis of 2015-2016. The cluster of cases of neonatal microcephaly detected in the country's northeast in the second half of 2015, and the possibility that a new virus transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes was responsible for this new syndrome, created a deep sense of shock and confusion in Brazil and around the world. When in February 2016 the WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of Internatio…
Historiography of Biomedicine
History of biomedicine is a hybrid domain, intersecting with many other scholarly disciplines. From the 1970s, historians who investigated recent developments in medicine increasingly shared the approaches, presuppositions, and methods of inquiry of historians and sociologists of science and technology. One reason is that the increasing reliance of medicine on technologies, instruments, and drugs makes the demarcation between "medicine," "science…
Ludwik Fleck's Roles in Society
In his early writings, the late Joseph Ben-David put forward a model accounting for certain kinds of cases of the emergence of new disciplines. We argue that Ben-David's explanations fall squarely within the sociology of knowledge — and, in fact, have many points in common with explanations in the tradition of the `strong programme' in that discipline. Specifically, Ben-David's central theoretical concept — that of `role hybridization' — overlaps…
Hydroxychloroquine Controversies
The claim that anti-malaria drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, can cure COVID-19 became a focus of fierce political battles that pitted promoters of these pharmaceuticals, Presidents Bolsonaro and Trump among them, against "medical elites." At the center of these battles are different meanings of effectiveness in medicine, the complex role of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in proving such effectiveness, the task of medical experts and …
Imperfect tools for a difficult job
The quasi-totality of social scientists who studied screening for cervical tumours identified such screening with a single method: the Pap smear (exfoliative cytology). This article explains that this method was not valid everywhere. The history of screening for cervical cancer in Brazil displays an alternative method for detecting cervical malignancies: a direct observation of the cervix with a specific instrument--the colposcope. The developmen…
French hormones
Localizing the Global
Tests for hereditary predispositions to breast and ovarian cancer have figured among the first medical applications of the new knowledge gleaned from the Human Genome Project. These applications have set off heated debates on general issues such as intellectual property rights. The genetic diagnosis of breast cancer risks, and the management of women "at risk" has nevertheless developed following highly localized paths. There are major difference…
On hybridizations, networks and new disciplines
How genetics came to the unborn
Hormone replacement therapy, cancer, controversies, and women’s health
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, bi…
Leaking Containers
In 1958, the Pan American Health Organization declared that Brazil had successfully eradicated the mosquito Aedes aegypti, responsible for the transmission of yellow fever, dengue fever, chikungunya, and Zika virus. Yet in 2016 the Brazilian minister of health described the situation of dengue fever as “catastrophic.” Discussing the recent epidemic of Zika virus, which amplified the crisis produced by the persistence of dengue fever, Brazil’s pre…
Cancer, women, and public health
Cytological screening for cervical cancer (the Pap smear), the first attempt at mass screening for a human malignancy, is often presented as a non-problematic demonstration of the feasibility of such screening. Screening for this tumor became a model for screening for other malignancies: breast, colon and prostate. My text follows the early history of the Pap smear and the conditions that led to its transformation into a routine screening test, d…
Introduction
The “Abortion Pill” Misoprostol in Brazil
In the aftermath of the introduction of severe restrictions on abortion in several US states, some activists have argued that providing widespread access to an abortive drug, misoprostol, will transform an induced abortion into a fully private act and therefore will empower women. In Brazil, where abortion is criminalized, the majority of women who wish to terminate an unwanted pregnancy already use the illegal, but easily accessible, misoprostol…
Prenatal diagnosis
Intersexe et transsexualités
Le sexe social est construit sur un mode binaire. Par contre, le sexe biologique se présente comme un continuum, avec, aux deux extrêmes, les « sexes biologiques » clairement définis et, au milieu, une large gamme de situations intermédiaires — des individus « intersexe ». De tels individus remettent en cause nos certitudes sur la stabilité des catégories « homme » et « femme ». Cet article trace l’histoire des interventions médicales ayant pour …
Ludwik Fleck e a presente história das ciências
O médico e epistemologista Ludwik Fleck desenvolveu, nas décadas de 1920-30, uma abordagem bastante original para o estudo das ciências. Ele apoiou sua epistemologia em duas bases: por um lado, em sua própria experiência profissional de bacteriologista e imunologista; por outro, na reflexão da Escola Polonesa de Filosofia da Medicina sobre as práticas dos médicos. Tal escola julga que os 'fatos científicos' são construídos por comunidades de pesq…
Imperfect diagnosis
When the Zika virus burst onto the international scene in the second half of 2015, the development of diagnostic tools was seen as an urgent global health priority. Diagnostic capacity was restricted to a small number of reference laboratories, and none of the few available molecular or serological tests had been validated for extensive use in an outbreak setting. In the early weeks of the crisis, key funders stepped in to accelerate research and…
Testing Covid-19 in Brazil
Since the first recorded case of COVID-19 on February 26, 2020, Brazil has seen an exponential growth in the number of cases and deaths. The national testing approach has been insufficient to correctly use this tool in the support of containing the epidemic in the country. In this communication, we discuss efforts and challenges to scale-up COVID-19 testing at the Brazilian Unified National Health System (SUS). This communication presents the ini…
A river that is cutting its own bed’
Representação e intervenção em saúde pública
As tentativas feitas pelos especialistas da Fundação Rockefeller de erradicar a febre amarela no Brasil foram prejudicadas pela baixa visibilidade desta patologia. Os casos eram, em sua maioria, atípicos e se confundiam facilmente com outras febres. Na década de 1920, os especialistas dependiam de observações clínicas para avaliar a incidência da febre amarela. Na década seguinte, porém, conceberam métodos indiretos para visualizar a presença de …
Test, Test, Test
This article follows the introduction of COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) diagnostic tests in France. It shows how, at the intersection of science, medicine, politics, and policy-making, the test, trace, and isolate (TTI) strategy played out during the first months of the pandemic against a backcloth of multiple shortages. In so doing, the authors move beyond trite explanations (such as 'French public health's backwardness') to highlight …
Nouvelles techniques reproductives, nouvelle production du genre
Archined est l’archive ouverte institutionnelle et la base patrimoniale des publications, communications et autres travaux scientifiques produits par les chercheur.e.s, y compris les chercheur.e.s associé.e.s, et ingénieur.e.s de l’Ined
Choix scientifiques et choix éthiques dans le traitement de la maladie rénale terminale
Quantification in Science and Cognition Circa 1937 A Newly Discovered Text of Ludwik Fleck
Although Ludwik Fleck is today recognized as one of the pioneers of the historical sociology of science, his historical and epistemological writings, most of them dating from the 1930s, long remained practically unknown. They were rediscovered following the mention of Fleck's principal work, the monograph Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935) in the preface of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), and thanks to the …
Ludwik Fleck's Roles in Society
In his early writings, the late Joseph Ben-David put forward a model accounting for certain kinds of cases of the emergence of new disciplines. We argue that Ben-David's explanations fall squarely within the sociology of knowledge — and, in fact, have many points in common with explanations in the tradition of the `strong programme' in that discipline. Specifically, Ben-David's central theoretical concept — that of `role hybridization' — overlaps…
From Guinea Pigs to Man The Development of Haffkine's Anticholera Vaccine
Journal Article From Guinea Pigs to Man The Development of Haffkine's Anticholera Vaccine Get access ILANA LÖWY ILANA LÖWY Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 47, Issue 3, July 1992, Pages 270–309, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/47.3.270 Published: 01 July 1992
The Strength of Loose Concepts - Boundary Concepts, Federative Experimental Strategies and Disciplinary Growth
On hybridizations, networks and new disciplines
Ludwik Fleck e a presente história das ciências
O médico e epistemologista Ludwik Fleck desenvolveu, nas décadas de 1920-30, uma abordagem bastante original para o estudo das ciências. Ele apoiou sua epistemologia em duas bases: por um lado, em sua própria experiência profissional de bacteriologista e imunologista; por outro, na reflexão da Escola Polonesa de Filosofia da Medicina sobre as práticas dos médicos. Tal escola julga que os 'fatos científicos' são construídos por comunidades de pesq…
Nothing More to Be Done
The ArgumentPatients suffering from advanced, incurable cancer often receive from their doctors proposals to enroll in a clinical trial of an experimental therapy. Experimental therapies are increasingly perceived not as a highly problematic approach but as a near-standard way to deal with incurable cancer. There are, however, important differences in the diffusion of these therapies in Western countries. The large diffusion of experimental thera…
Les «faits scientifiques» et leur public
Au cours des années 1910 et 1920, les effets conjugués des idées savantes sur la spécificité des anticorps, de la croyance profane à l'existence d'un sang syphilitique et de l'importance attribuée à la détection de la syphilis par les autorités sanitaires ont permis de transformer un test diagnostique peu efficace, la réaction de Wassermann, en «fait scientifique» incontestable. Ce fait scientifique établit l'équivalence« individu Wassermann posi…
Le genre dans l'histoire sociale et culturelle des sciences
En 1966, Georges Canguilhem estimait important de faire clairement la distinction entre l'objet naturel, celui que la science utilise comme prétexte, l'objet de la science qui est un produit culturel, et l'objet spécifique de l'histoire des sciences qui ne devait en aucun cas être confondu avec l'objet de la science. L'article ' Pour une histoire sociale et culturelle des sciences ' illustre le réel renouveau des méthodes employées pour construir…
Medicine and charity before the welfare state
La standardisation de l'inconnu
A partir de l'etude d'un cas, l'introduction en cancerologie d'une therapie experimentale basee sur l'interleukine-2, l'article suit les negociations autour de la redaction des protocoloes therapeutiques qui ont encadre l'introduction de cette innovation. Il montre le role joue par ces protocoles pour coordonner et aligner les pratiques des « mondes sociaux » heterogenes qui participent a un essai therapeutique, ainsi que leur impact sur la redis…
Les métaphores de l'immunologie
Immunology has always relied on metaphorical language. In its early beginnings, it varied between bellicose images and images that stressed the interaction of immunity mechanisms with the organism's physiological functions overall. In the late nineteenth century, white blood globules were not only compared to 'border police' assigned to rebuffing intruders -- an army formed to combat the invaders -- but were also described as a physiological mech…
The legislation of things
The Invisible Industrialist
Industrial methods, and industrially produced instruments, reagents and living organisms are central to research activities today. They play a key role in the homogenization and the diffusion of labor
Invisible Industrialist
El regreso de las epidemias
"Se reúne una serie de investigaciones sobre distintas epidemias ocurridas en el Perú durante el siglo veinte. Según este libro las epidemias y las políticas sanitarias destinadas a combatirlas constituyen hechos fundamentales para explicar la historia de la medicina y la percepción popular sobre la salud y la enfermedad en el país".― Prefacio
François Chast, Histoire contemporaine des médicaments, Paris, La Découverte, 1995, 388 p
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Marie Angèle Hermitte, Le sang et le droit
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Joseph Ben-David, Éléments d'une sociologie historique des sciences, textes réunis et introduits par Gad Freundenthal, Paris, PUF, 1997, 376 p
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The Philosophy and History of Molecular Biology
Bulletin of the History of Medicine - Volume 73, Number 1, Spring 1999
Gender and Science
While there are several different approaches to the study of gender and science, this paper focuses on the consequences of the introduction of the concept of gender on studies of scientific and medical practices. It is limited, in the main, to historical studies of twentieth‐century biomedicine, which allows an examination of the validity of scientific assumptions underlying our understanding of the natural world, the genesis and the present stat…
Representação e intervenção em saúde pública
As tentativas feitas pelos especialistas da Fundação Rockefeller de erradicar a febre amarela no Brasil foram prejudicadas pela baixa visibilidade desta patologia. Os casos eram, em sua maioria, atípicos e se confundiam facilmente com outras febres. Na década de 1920, os especialistas dependiam de observações clínicas para avaliar a incidência da febre amarela. Na década seguinte, porém, conceberam métodos indiretos para visualizar a presença de …
Governing Molecules
Medicine as a social instrument
Medicine (65 works) · Political science (61 works) · Law (33 works) · Philosophy (32 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Humanities (31 works) · Biology (27 works) · Art (24 works) · Computer Science (19 works) · Philosophy (18 works)