The two themes mentioned in the title of Asian Biotech are popular with both academics and the general public. Editors Aihwa Ong and Nancy Chen flag ethics as the key concept for understanding local operations of science and technology, and they contextualize the rise of biotechnology in Asia within the region's dramatic economic fluctuations.
In her introduction, Aihwa Ong proposes the idea of “situated ethics” as a way to look into the complex intertwining of science and Asian societies. In contrast to considering science and technology as “being everywhere and nowhere all at once” (p. 32), situated ethics is an anthropological approach to biotechnology that focuses on cultural differences in ethical reasoning. This approach looks at such reasoning not just on an individual basis, but within collectives of various scales – kinship, ethnicity, and nation – that in their practice of ethics constitute “communities of fate.”
Fittingly, the chapters are on-the-ground studies; they aim to capture, both theoretically and ethnographically, a “transcendental moment in Asian scientific experimentation” (p. 43). Nancy Chen's afterword, though brief, reaffirms the significance of this moment. It describes the dynamic forces operating between biotechnology and society: the generation of knowledge, property and consumption on the one hand, and regulatory dimensions like biosecurity and governance on the other.
This volume is organized by theoretical themes: excess and opportunity, bioventures, communities of fate, and biosovereignty. But the chapters presented here are considerably diverse. The locations they focus on – from India to Japan, Singapore to South Korea – are not usually discussed together in anthropology or regional study collections. What is more, the chapters cover a wide topical range in biotechnology, including knowledge creation (stem cell and genomic research, biobanking), policy formation and controversies (medical tourism, genetically modified food, the use of embryos in research) and interactions with global institutions, mainly the pharmaceutical industry, through clinical trials. While sharing some theoretical commonalities, such as biopolitics, governmentality and an interest in global assemblages, each chapter has its own distinct academic background, theoretical orientation, attention to local context, and treatment of technical details.
Some chapters complement one another especially nicely. For example, Kaushik Sunder Rajan's chapter links ethnographic analysis of clinical trials in India with theoretical algorithms that are used to understand experimental machinery. Employing a similar political economy framework to understand drug testers, physicians and consumers, Stefan Ecks's chapter critically locates global co-operative citizenship in relation to the network of pharmaceutical marketing. Some chapters, such as those on stem cell research, make their own distinct arguments about global connections, nationalistic sentiment and research governance. While the volume is too short and the region too large to be able to convey a comprehensive picture of biotechnology's impacts, most contributors, as anthropologists, convincingly capture the emergent nature of biotechnology, even as their approaches to it vary. While Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner and Charis Thompson provide loose historical sketches to support their arguments, for instance, Ara Wilson bases her arguments firmly on the complex history of medical tourism in Thailand, including medical system reforms, population dynamics and urbanization, the sex trade, military impacts of the US's regional presence, and the state's attempts to recover from financial crisis.
From a regional studies perspective the book is decidedly East Asia-focused. Many of its themes (competitiveness, nationalism, and guanxi, or interpersonal networks) will be familiar to researchers working in this area. More than half of the chapters are devoted to East Asia (Singapore and Thailand excluded): China's rising economy and expanding market are dealt with in several chapters, and three chapters touch on biotechnology in Japan, Taiwan and Korea.
In contrast to more conventional state-oriented reports, these countries are treated from a context-laden comparative perspective. Chen's chapter on Chinese genetically modified cotton, soy and rice, for example, reveals how the state's concerns about agricultural production, global trade, and the ownership and profitability of scientific innovations results in distinctive treatments of these crops – altogether a more complicated orientation toward such technology than in Western countries. Thompson's chapter compares Singapore's internationalist approach to regenerative medicine with Korea's nationalist strategy. As a scholar of Taiwanese biotech, I found the most intriguing juxtaposition in the book in the last two chapters, which are grouped under the heading “Mappings of Chineseness.” Jennifer Liu's chapter traces the historical and political complexity of identity that drives Taiwan's pursuit of stem cell lines “with genetic characteristics of the Taiwanese.” Wen-Ching Sung's chapter, on the other hand, reveals a duality in the nationalist discourse presented in China's genomic projects. The political tensions described in these two chapters may not be new to readers of this journal. Yet, what remains striking is the inextricable relationship of science and politics at the frontier of biomedicine, bearing out Bruno Latour's statement – quoted at the beginning of Liu's chapter – that “science is politics by other means” (p. 239).
Overall, Asian Biotech is a thoughtful examination of Asia's biotechnology development. The call to understand this realm in terms of situated ethics and communities of fate is persuasive and invites the analysis of more cases to test the robustness of these concepts. I look forward to more transnational studies exploring this region's emergence on the global biotechnology landscape.
