Postcolonial Values: Nationalist Industries in Pharmaceutical Empire

This chapter describes the incorporation of ethical and normative commitments into the value-generating activities of the multinational R&D-driven pharmaceutical industry through discourses of innovation and materialized through practices of corporate social responsibility. I focus specifically on Novartis’s drug donation program, the Gleevec International Patient Assistance Program (GIPAP), and the way in which it was established and run on the ground in India. In addition to imbrications of different registers of value (market and ethical), one sees here complex articulations of experimental and therapeutic biomedical economies.