Asian Biopoleis: Practice, Place, and Life

Our title, “Asian Biopoleis: Practice, Place, and Life,” is also the name of a research initiative under way at the National University of Singapore (NUS) since 2010, and is the theme of this issue.¹ The NUS project is likely the first comprehensive social science and humanities research collaboration, housed at a major university and funded by a national granting agency, dedicated to bioscience and biomedicine in Asia. Given Singapore’s close identification with this realm of knowledge creation, capital accumulation, clinical and laboratory practice, visual imaging, and storytelling—particularly embodied in the creation of its science cities—the STS clusters of NUS’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Asia Research Institute thought it timely to begin generating insightful scholarship about bioscience/biomedicine from this corner of the world. While some fine articles and book chapters by North American, Australian, and European scholars have been written about biotechnology in Southeast Asia, less has been written from Southeast Asia, or in cooperation with Singapore-based scholars. The present EASTS issue and a 2012 special issue of the journal Science, Technology, and Society (vol. 17, no. 1)² are early steps toward bringing the growing scholarship on biomedicine in Southeast Asia (and East Asia through the lens of Southeast Asian institutions and projects) to a regional and global audience.

Biopoleis is the plural of Biopolis, the name of Singapore’s foremost biomedical research center, created at the turn of the millennium. At the time, Singapore itself was referred to in many press accounts as the “biopolis of Asia,” replacing the nickname of the previous decade, the “intelligent island,” whose reference point had been the introduction of information technology (Clancey 2012). The term biopolis embraces more than simply infrastructure and investment, capturing both “the way of life of human collectives” and “the city-state, the ancient space of governance, and citizenship” (Waldby 2009: 367). In hindsight, that attempt at branding greatly underestimated the scale and intensity of interest in biomedical research all over Asia, a frenzy of science-city building (and, in some instances, conversion) that has yet to crest. It is now more appropriate to speak of Asian biopoleis, archipelagos of geographically dispersed but increasingly imbricated places where biomedicine is practiced, defined, and made civic, from Turkey and Iran to Korea and Japan. Asia itself is in some sense being redefined and reimagined through the increased ubiquity of this research, and whole populations are being brought within its rubric. That this is largely an urban phenomenon, and one increasingly mixed up with issues of governance and even political identity, makes the “-polis” label appropriate even beyond the growing theoretical association of this sector with “biopolitics.”

The Asian Biopoleis project (see www.asianbiopoleis.com) conducted its first workshop in January 2011, with eleven speakers from outside Singapore and a similar number from NUS.³ The six paper sessions reflected interdisciplinary and regional convergences, with contributions from Singapore, China, India, Japan, Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam, and from the perspectives of anthropology, critical theory, design, history, philosophy, and sociology. Panels included “Biomedicine and Singapore”; “Securities, Standards and Policy”; “Laboratories, Networks, and Practices”; “Bio-sampling and Biobanking”; and “Philosophy, Religion and Meaning.” On the third day of the workshop, a panel session titled “Consumer Genomics, Citizen Science, and DIYBio Movements” was held at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) in the heart of the Singapore Biopolis, reflecting ongoing engagement with Asian biotech/science/medical labs and institutes. Edison Liu, GIS director and president of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO), was a collaborator in this project as well as an inspiration. The eight articles on this subject (two of which, by Michael M. J. Fischer and Philip Cho, will appear in a subsequent EASTS issue) represent a cross section of the papers presented at the conference. A second workshop has since taken place in Singapore, in July 2012, and a third is scheduled for July 2013, in conjunction with the biannual conference of the Asia Pacific STS Network.

Biomedicine and bioscience are unusual, among science projects, in the intensity of the social science and...