Research Interests: Medical anthropology; social medicine; global health; drug policy; politics of health; histories of medicine in the Philippines and Southeast Asia.

Gideon Lasco is currently pursuing an AM in the History of Science at Harvard University, in pursuit of broadening his knowledge in the social sciences of medicine. A physician and medical anthropologist, his scholarship has covered contemporary health crises, health systems, and drug issues in the Philippines and Asia, as well as medical populism and the politics of health. His particular research interests within the history of science include histories of medicine in Philippines and Southeast Asia, specifically in charting social and political responses to medical (or medicalized) issues like HIV/AIDS, SARS, COVID-19, illicit drugs, and vaccination scandals. Drawing on STS and the anthropology of the body and building on his dissertation on the meanings and materialities of height in the Philippines, he hopes to explore the history of human stature - that is, the meanings and materialities of human height across various cultures and periods.

Publications:

Lasco, G. (2023). Measuring race and nation: Pediatric anthropometry and child growth charts in the Philippines (1909-2008). Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 71(1), 37-52.

Lasco, G., ed. (2021). Drugs and Philippine Society. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

Lasco, G. (2020). Drugs and drug wars as populist tropes in Asia: Illustrative examples and implications for drug policy. International Journal of Drug Policy, 77, 102668.

Lasco, G. (2020). The Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak in the Philippines in 2003. Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 68(3/4), 339-371.

Lasco, G. (2020). Medical populism and the COVID-19 pandemic. Global Public Health, 15(10), 1417-1429.

Lasco, G. (2018). "Little brown brothers": Height and the Philippine–American colonial encounter (1898–1946). Philippine Studies: Historical & Ethnographic Viewpoints, 375-406.

Previous Degrees:

M.D. and M.Sc. (Medical Anthropology), University of the Philippines;

PhD (Medical Anthropology), University of Amsterdam