Researcher at Freie Universität Berlin will receive almost 1.5 million euros in funding from the European Research Council

Social and cultural anthropologist Marcos Freire de Andrade Neves carries out research at Freie Universität Berlin on the global spread of sodium pentobarbital, a pharmaceutical that is primarily used to facilitate both voluntary and coerced death. The European Research Council (ERC) has now awarded him an ERC Starting Grant worth 1.49 million euros for his interdisciplinary research project MORTALMED. The project aims to shed a light on the societal, political, and cultural dimensions of sodium pentobarbital and its use.

Marcos Freire de Andrade Neves is a research associate in Freie Universität Berlin’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, where he carries out research and teaching in the research area Medical Anthropology | Global Health. He researches the transnational circulation of people, pharmaceuticals, technologies, and documents in the context of assisted dying and the death penalty. Freire de Andrade Neves studied at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, where he also completed his doctorate. He has worked as a lecturer and researcher at Freie Universität Berlin since 2020 and completed a research stay at the University of Edinburgh through the DAAD PRIME program from 2022‒2023. Last year, he was awarded the Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship in Ethnographic Film by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, which is providing him a stipend to complete his documentary Not Dead Yet. The documentary chronicles the parallel lives of two retired theater actors living in a circus wagon beside a German lake, and a Swiss physician who provides assistance in dying.

Freire de Andrade Neves’s research project, MORTALMED (“Mortal Medicine: The Social Life of a Death-Inducing Pharmaceutical”), will be funded by the European Research Council. The project combines qualitative and quantitative research methods in a mixed-methods approach to analyze sodium pentobarbital’s role as a “pharmakon” (i.e., both a remedy and a poison) and how it is integrated into various legal frameworks, power structures, and cultural practices around the world.

Specifically, Freire de Andrade Neves will trace sodium pentobarbital’s circulation across three key contexts: assisted dying in Switzerland, state-sanctioned executions in the United States, and its commercialization in Mexico.

MORTALMED will investigate how pharmaceuticals function beyond health contexts, exploring the broader socio-political dynamics and power structures that both shape and are shaped by their use. The project will also shed light on how sodium pentobarbital’s circulation through formal and informal networks reflects and reinforces socio-economic and racial inequalities.
“By reassembling the socio-cultural biography of sodium pentobarbital, the project offers a critical perspective on how pharmaceuticals contribute to the governance of life and death,” says Freire de Andrade Neves. “This will provide us with important insights into the contemporary and future implications of pharmaceutical-mediated death.” MORTALMED will significantly contribute to political and legal debates surrounding assisted dying, the use of the death penalty, and how pharmaceuticals are regulated and distributed around the world, while reframing questions of global health and justice from a new perspective.