Abstract
The articles in this volume are a strong sample of those generated by this project, as were those in a previous and related special volume of Science, Technology, and Society (volume 17, issue number 1) published in 2012. 1 Most of the current articles were delivered in draft form at the 2012 annual Asian Biopoleis Workshop (‘Crossing Boundaries’) in Singapore, the second of the three international workshops organised under these grants. The exception is Dr Michael Fischer’s article, which builds on research he reported at the first Asian Biopoleis Workshop in 2011.
Dr Fischer’s work in and around Singapore’s Biopolis not only predates our own, but has served as a direct inspiration for our larger project, which he has been gracious enough to join and mentor. 2 As a result of Dr Fischer’s involvement, we were also able to meet and enlist Dr Edison Liu, then the Director of the Genome Institute of Singapore, and President of the Human Genome Organisation, as a collaborator and supporter. Now the Director of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, Dr Liu’s encouragement, advice and real understanding of the role of STS initiatives in bioscience linger with us, and we are pleased to dedicate this volume to him.
We have often been asked since the start of this project ‘what is your research question?’ and ‘what is your conclusion?’ Both miss the ambition of the Asian Biopoleis initiative. Asian bioscience, biomedicine and bioengineering (if one can continue to make distinctions) is too complex and socially imbricated a realm of civic and private activity to be reduced to a single question (or answer). We use ‘realm’ rather than ‘sector’ because the former evokes a polity and the latter only an economy or site of production. While we are certainly dealing with a productive economy here, our team has been particularly interested in how Asian biomedical research facilities ‘fit’ with surrounding human geographies, beginning with the cities and countries they are in and extending to the region and the world. Their production of medical advances, scientific papers and research careers is important, but so too are their connectivities, charismas, practical and discursive contributions to unplanned events, and influences on political and cultural phenomena that are not necessarily bioscience. While we are certainly interested in producing better accounts of what biomedicine is (from its origins to its present trajectories), we are equally interested in what societies are like with biomedicine in them. Urban Asia is our particular venue, hence our use of the plural form (Biopoleis) of Singapore’s bio-science city, ‘Biopolis’, meant to suggest that civic culture throughout Asia, in a period of surging Asian self-confidence, is being changed by the presence and influence of this new set of socio-medical activities. In fact, the current atmosphere of self-confidence and the growth of the biomedical sector exist in a proximity, if not a relationship, which has yet to be plumbed. Though the social, historical and cultural study of biomedicine has been something of a global academic industry since the start of the Human Genome Project, surprisingly little of it has been directed at Asia, and still less has been produced from an Asian base.
Since our project is Asia-located and Asia-centred, we are less invested than some of our overseas colleagues in adopting a comparative perspective. The scholarly pattern of incorporating one or two Asian sites into what is primarily North American or European research has produced some valuable insights, and will continue to do so as long as universities and granting agencies in those regions remain interested in what is happening ‘on the other side of the world’ (particularly, it seems, in China). On the other hand, scholarship on Asian biomedicine cannot forever be restricted to a comparative (East and West) frame—with the Asian site being either an exotic corollary or normalising balance wheel—given the increasingly multi-sited nature of everything biomedicine involves. Increasingly too, the burgeoning number of sites that ‘do’ bioscience in one form or another, and that one thus needs to be aware of, are within Asia as well as between Asia and ‘the West’, or between Asia and other parts of the world, such as Africa and even Latin America. Moreover, the large academic grant-funded projects in Western universities that long fuelled study trips East for comparative projects are increasingly being cut back, while at the same time, Asian universities are releasing more funding for social scientists to study localities and regions closer to home. While this may not presage an epochal shift in the global economy of research projects and their funding sources, it means that more space has been opened for Asia-based studies that are either local or regional in their concerns (or both).
The Asian Biopoleis project is both a product and lever of such changes in the nature of research, which are occurring simultaneously in the social and physical/biological sciences. Just as bioscience is weaving increasingly dense and global networks or webs, so is (and must) social science, and humanities scholarship do the same. In fact, we have become increasingly aware of how, as social science and humanities scholars studying scientists and physicians, everything from our funding structures to research organisation to travel schedules has needfully kept pace (though at a far more modest level) with those of our subjects. The days when one could construct a coherent and convincing commentary on ‘science’ from the confines of a humanities or social science department (even if it were an STS department) are over. To follow scientists and doctors ‘in action’, whether or not one follows Bruno Latour or STS methodologies, is to move rapidly through unfamiliar territory, in directions unplanned, and with flexible methodologies. Just as a scientific lab needs to be diverse, nimble, populated, multi-dimensional, curious, and yet well-funded in order to survive and flourish, so too any social science project that has a prayer of understanding it.
The Asian Biopoleis initiative has evolved in our three years from the original concept of gathering and analysing mostly local data, and with a team of primarily local academics, into a more self-reflective and broadly inclusive discussion about what Asian biomedicine is (and is doing) across a range of Asian geographies and cultures. Like any ‘lab’, we sustain multiple projects, differing approaches, various funding streams, a differentiated social structure, a network of local and overseas collaborators, and a pipeline of publications. And also like any lab, we intend to ‘change the world’, however incrementally. While our most specific target is social science and humanities scholarship, there are related worlds outside the normative activity of conferring and publishing that the project has needed to engage and impact: for example, funding and support structures for this brand of inquiry, here and elsewhere in Asia; collaborative relations between Asia-based scientists/physicians and STS scholars; activism towards policy reform; and curriculum reform and teaching, among others.
As for our ongoing case studies, if one general conclusion stands out among all others, it is that Asian bioscience is not just Western bioscience transplanted. As biomedicine developed in this part of the world, as in others, it was bound to be different, but the nature and extent of that difference was also bound to be subtle, and sometimes controversial. As we have discovered and documented, the biomedical research cultures in various Asian countries evolved from different origins, and have thus carried as many local concerns, structures, interests and proclivities into the global bioscience network as have their Western counterparts. Moreover, as bioscience develops more global nodes, those in Asia exert increasing influence on the character of the whole, as the example of proteomics (this volume) demonstrates. So too does the setting (civic, social, political, economic, historical, and so on) of scientific research in Asia affect its daily and yearly practice as much as it does in Massachusetts, Scotland, Paris, or Greece. Many of these phenomena or categories are not ‘Eastern’ nor ‘Western’, but common to all places and times where science is made. Story-telling about their Asian manifestations has lagged, however, partly because qualitative research about science generally has lagged in the Asian academy, as so many more resources have been put into the quantitative, the abstract and the analytic. Our promotion of qualitative case studies—and on story-telling, among other forms—is a studied and intentional move to widen the genres in which bioscience can be discussed and interpreted.
The Asian Biopoleis project, and Asia-based STS in general, has also developed against a backdrop of growing self-confidence in the successes of Asian technical innovation. This has in turn opened more space for the type of critical self-reflection that this and other volumes aspire to. While innovation has a long history in this part of the world, particularly but not exclusively in the development of an export economy, its fruits in the form of widespread and sustainable upward mobility—and the ubiquity of advanced technologies in everyday settings—are more recent. One under-remarked result of this has been an increasing pan-Asianism, and a growing Asian triumphalism, that, in its most benign manifestation, attempts to overcome historic animosities, divisions and suspicions seen to have been exacerbated by colonialism. The organisation of our project is in part reflective of this historical moment, or turn. Our geographic scope, for example, has included all countries within the triangle India–Japan–Indonesia, and has sought where possible to locate regional connections. This also meant enlisting academics with skills in several languages, and with scholarly interests that extended out of labs and scientific communities and into the histories and societies in which biomedical communities were embedded. We continue to believe that a regional approach to scholarship on Asian bioscience is far better suited to the reality of its daily practice than one involving comparative national stories. This ideal has been hard to achieve in practice, however, partly because of the continuing commitment of most collaborators in the social sciences and humanities to national communities, languages and resources.
Biomedicine—through the SNP project, the fight against SARS, and the simple movement of personnel between the region’s science cities—has likewise become a platform for discussions about ‘Asia’. The tagging of specific diseases as ‘Asian’—either because of their prevalence in the region, the unique regional or country-specific resources brought to bear on their cure, or the potential profits to be made by developing drugs for regional markets—has helped develop the sense that local/regional labs are working on local/regional problems, and not just for the benefit of an abstract ‘mankind’ (which has long been perceived as a Western avatar). This has, in some instances, reified a sense of racial or ethnic identity, even as the concept of ‘personal medicine’ turns increasing attention to individuals. In any case, biomedicine has proven a rich field in which to think about Asia, as well as Asia’s continuing strong connections to the West, making the long-held but far-from-realised ideal of ‘global science’ seem increasingly real.
Turning more specifically to the articles in this volume, they well represent the range of topics, geographies and disciplinary perspectives or genres that the Asian Biopoleis project has encouraged and sponsored. John DiMoia’s article on the one hand, and Michitake Aso’s and Annick Guénel’s, on the other, represent a strong interest among collaborators in the origins of Asian biomedical communities, in this case Singapore and Vietnam. As previous articles by Gelfert and Clancey have documented, Singapore’s biomedical research culture was not imported full-blown from abroad, but had a pre-existing local context in the 1980s and 1990s, and emerged from political as well as economic milieus. 3 DiMoia’s article goes back farther still, to an IVF laboratory of the 1960s, and population-planning policies that were not restricted to Singapore, but reflective of global and regional concerns in that period. In finding biomedical research origins (and continuities) in IVF work, DiMoia’s research does not just flesh out the Singapore story, but maps Singapore into a wider Asian network of IVF labs that would become contributory to biomedical research cultures across the region. For their part, Aso and Guénel are truly breaking ground in looking at North Vietnam in the same period, and finding that war-time medicine and the context of international socialism were conducive to biomedical research in their own fashion. The career of a respected and cosmopolitan Vietnamese physician–researcher is their entry into a medical world where understanding the effects of dioxin and Agent Orange were more pressing than fertility, patenting, publishing, or like activities. On the other hand, Dr Tung in Vietnam was not necessarily more isolated than Dr Bongso in Singapore, but was part of a very different international and political network of exchange.
The article by Gregory Clancey and Liz P.Y. Chee traces the recent emergence of a new community of bio-scientists: proteomics researchers. Their particular focus is on the Chinese-led Human Liver Proteome Project as an unusual example of an Asia-headquartered ‘global initiative’ in the biosciences, and a project with interesting reverberations in the field of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Their article connects with earlier work by project collaborator Masato Fukushima on protein chemists in Japan (Masato, 2013), and resonates as well with the one ‘stand-alone’ article in this issue, by Jane Calvert on synthetic biologists.
While emergent biomedical communities or cultures are the concern of some Asian Biopoleis collaborators, others focus on emergent institutions and their governing frames. Haidan Chen traces a unique trans-national biobank collaboration between China and the UK, and discusses its potential policy implications. Achim Rosemann uses the China Spinal Cord Injury Network, a collaboration spanning China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the US, to posit and think about an emergent ‘multipolarising science world’. Both studies reveal crucial yet under-reported and under-theorised developments in Asian bioscience that could not have been revealed through the normative frames of national or comparative studies.
Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner’s article is unique in this volume for its focus on bioethical issues, though this has been a major (if not the major) concern of social science literature on biomedicine generally. Her subject is the ‘social mindscapes’ of Japanese scientists who conduct or discuss human stem cell research. Sleeboom-Faulkner interviewed over thirty Japanese subjects, and make important distinctions between the attitudes of ‘science managers’, who are most often the public face of science, and those who actually deal with stem cells in research labs.
Lastly, Michael M.J. Fischer’s article lays out biomedicine in Singapore as a whole variegated world, characterised by its links to other worlds, but still a very definite place, series of moments and set of possibilities. As the chief ethnographer of Singapore’s genomics community (and other communities that radiate from its headquarters in Singapore’s Biopolis), Fischer makes use of his unique access to craft inter-linked case studies about emergent phenomena, thickly described, and with the scientific bench-work taken as seriously as the social relations.
Each of these articles opens a different window into Asian biomedicine. They are set on different scales, use different methods and engage different questions. This is a strength of the volume rather than a shortcoming. Their production (and publication) in close proximity has informed and shaped, but not set them into common orbit, or artificially and prematurely reduced the landscape of an emergent Asian bioscience to a single scholarly point. If ‘Asia’ itself explodes as a place or subject, that may also be an achievement, though common alternatives such as ‘China’ or ‘global bioscience’ offer no safe or comfortable fallback. The sites and activities in these articles no longer exist in an exotic East, but neither are they ‘typical’ (culture-less) sites on a global grid. As more and more STS is discussed, produced and published in this region, paralleling the increased production here of science itself, scholarship everywhere will have to search for new languages and registers in which to describe such emergent phenomena.
Although her setting or subject is not Asia, we have included in this volume a thematically related paper by our Edinburgh University collaborator Jane Calvert. Calvert has crafted an ethnography of synthetic biologists, mainly through participant–observation in Europe and North America, emphasising the novelty, boldness and potential contradictions of this community’s attempts to apply engineering principles and methods to ‘creating’ new life forms. Like the protein scientists discussed by Clancey and Chee, this particular community of bio-scientists is becoming prominent enough globally that Asia-based scholars would do well to build on Calvert’s work.