Biehl wins anthropology book award

João Biehl, professor of anthropology, has received the Diana Forsythe Prize for his book "Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival."

Biehl received the prize Nov. 22 at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in San Francisco. The prize celebrates outstanding anthropological research on science and technology, including biomedicine, and it is awarded by the Committee on the Anthropology of Society, Technology and Computing and the Society for the Anthropology of Work.

In "Will to Live," Biehl describes how Brazil became the first developing country to universalize access to life-saving AIDS therapies and why this policy is so difficult to implement among poor Brazilians with HIV/AIDS. Biehl collaborated with photographer Torben Eskerod on the book, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2007.