Plants into Pills

Abstract

Charting a path to “learn from the collector of herbs” was the central goal and challenge of a network of scientists and technocrats working through the World Health Organization (WHO) Task Force on Indigenous Plants for Fertility Regulation, founded in 1976. Disaggregating the traditional medicine program of the WHO into drug research and primary healthcare shows the distinct, sometimes conflicting political projects that shaped the WHO’s programming in traditional medicine in the 1970s. The analysis of the Task Force and its origins is motivated by an interest in understanding a central irony of the Task Force’s agenda for fertility regulation: turning plants currently being consumed for fertility regulation into pills through a difficult and expensive process of research and development. Tracing a genealogy of the Task Force to earlier national models from West Germany, the United States, and India, this article shows the complexities of forging a North–South collaboration on fertility regulation in the WHO, arguing that the aims of industrial development and resource sovereignty simultaneously motivated and limited the extent of collaboration in fertility regulation research while narrowing the contributions of plants to their “active ingredients.” The Task Force’s story challenges us to conceptualize fertility regulation as a developmentalist concern, and thus crucially inflected by the broader pushes for alternative pathways to development and a more just global economic order in the mid‐1970s.