Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Friedman’s imperial reference to Columbus in this chapter’s epigraph is not accidental . The World Is Flat, as I have shown elsewhere, reflects an ambivalent folding of imperial/colonial anxieties with celebration of the “flattening” of the world. See Amit Prasad and Srirupa Prasad, “Imaginative Geography, Neoliberal Governmentality , and Colonial Distinctions: Docile and Dangerous Bodies in Medical Transcription Outsourcing,” Cultural Geographies 19, no. 3 (2012): 348–363. 2. Several studies, academic as well as nonacademic, have argued that a dramatic shift in the world economy is taking shape at present. See, for example, Andre Gunder Frank, Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). 3. Kelly Joyce has argued that the acceptance and proliferation of MRI was to a significant extent due to its status as a cultural icon, even though a variety of other factors were also involved. Kelly Joyce, Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 1–23. Technoscience is a term used by Latour to “describe all the elements tied to scientific contents no matter how dirty, unexpected or foreign they seem.” Latour contrasts technoscience to “science and technology,” within quotation marks, to designate what is kept of technoscience once all the trials of responsibility have been settled. See Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 174. 4. “Noninnovating South” and “innovating North” have been constitutive elements of global trade in the minds of many. Thus Paul Krugman “postulate[s] a world of two countries: innovating North and noninnovating South. The lag in adoption of new technology gives rise to trade.” See Paul Krugman, “A Model of Innovation, Technology Transfer, and the World Distribution of Income,” Journal of Political Economy 87, no. 2 (1979): 253. 120 Notes 5. Susantha Goonatilake ascribes the “backwardness” and lack of creativity among the Indian/South Asian scientists to a lag in diffusion of knowledge from the West to the non-West. Susantha Goonatilake, Aborted Discovery: Science and Creativity in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1984), 110.Vandana Shiva and Jayanta Bandyopadhyay , on the other hand, have argued that, even though “the scientific profession in India is the third largest in the world, it does not constitute a scientific community sharing scientific values and commitments.” Vandana Shiva and Jayanta Bandyopadhyay, “The Large and Fragile Community of Scientists in India,” Minerva 28, no. 4 (1980): 593. 6. The debate over the lag or decline in scientific research in India continued through the 1990s and even into the new millennium. See, for example, Subbiah Arunachalam, “Is Science in India on the Decline?” Current Science 83, no. 2 (2002): 107–108; and B. M. Gupta and K. C. Garg, “Is Science in India on the Decline? A Rejoinder,” Current Science 83, no. 12 (2002): 1431–1432. On the other hand, divergent views were also being expressed in these years. Raghunath Mashelkar, in his presidential address to the Indian Science Congress in 2000, for example, claimed that “next century will belong to India.” Raghunath Mashelkar, “India’s R & D: Reaching for the Top,” Science 307 (2005): 1415. 7. Kirsten Bound et al., “The New Geography of Innovation: India, Finland, Science and Technology,” Sitra Reports 71 (Helsinki: Demos, 2006). 8. Ibid., 18–19. 9. Ibid., 19. There is a large body of literature on the impact of colonialism on scientific and technological practices in India. See, for example, Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism 1850–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Deepak Kumar, Science and Empire (New Delhi: Anamika Prakashan, 1991); V. V. Krishna, “The Colonial Model and the Emergence of National Science in India, 1876–1920,” in Science and Empires: Historical Studies about Scientific Development and European Expansion, ed. Patrick Petitjean, Catherine Jami, and Anne Marie Moulin (Hague: Kluwer Academic, 1992), 57–72; Roy MacLeod and Deepak Kumar, Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfer to India, 1700–1947 (New Delhi: Sage, 1995); Zaheer Baber, The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996); Ahsan Jan Qaisar, The Indian Response to European Technology and Culture , A.D. 1498–1707 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998); Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Pratik Chakrabarti, Western Science in Modern...