EGENIS seminar: "Radioisotopes, electrophoresis, and the Third World: a global look into biomedicine", Prof Edna Suárez-Diaz (Universidad Autónoma de México)

African, Asian, and Latin American scientists have contributed heavily to the biomedical understanding of bodies and diseases that transformed health interventions in the second half of the 20th century. As researchers in newly created national institutions, or as officials at international agencies such as the IAEA and the WHO, they built and sustained scientific networks that took over a host of “neglected diseases”, most of them still classified under the label of tropical medicine. Radioisotopes, electrophoresis, immunoassays, and many other biomedical technologies of the 1950s-1970s can be used as historical tracers of biomedical research within these transregional networks, revealing the crossing of political and ideological frontiers in the context of development programs during the early Cold War.