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

Introduction

Introduction “The world is flat.” As soon as I wrote [these words], I realized that this was the underlying message that I had seen and heard in Bangalore in two weeks of filming. The global competitive field was being leveled. The world was being flattened. I had come to Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, on my own Columbus-like journey of exploration. . . . Columbus accidently ran into America but thought he had discovered part of India. I actually found India and thought many of the people I met there were Americans. Some had actually taken American names, and others were doing great imitations of American accents at call centers and American business techniques at software labs. —Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, 2007 “The world is flat,” despite its seductiveness, is as chimerical a notion today as it was in the medieval times.1 Nevertheless, there can be little dispute that the transnational geography of science and technology has dramatically shifted in recent times.2 In the last four decades, during which magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has emerged as a cutting-edge medical technology and a “cultural icon,” technoscientific practices and imaginaries have undergone a profound change.3 In the 1970s and the early 1980s, when the first possibilities for MRI were being explored, India, for example, was considered a part of the “noninnovating South.”4 The next decade, in which MRI stabilized as a clinical tool, brought no change in this viewpoint. Sociological and historical studies continued to highlight the “lag” that seemed to bedevil scientific research in India, while proposing reasons for the “lack of creativity” among the Indian scientists.5 With the new millennium , however, as MRI moved into new research and diagnostic domains, divergent voices could be heard.6 In 2006, “The New Geography of Innovation ,” a Sitra report published by a British think tank, called for a radical departure from the commonly accepted historiography of transnational 2 Introduction technoscience.7 “India has a scientific heritage that belies its ‘developing country’ tag,” the report categorically asserted. “The widely held belief that modern science began following the European dark ages neglects the fact that the dark ages were not dark everywhere.”8 It is hard to imagine a major policy document on technoscientific innovation questioning the Eurocentric genealogy of “modern science” at that time, much less decades earlier. Nonetheless, the Sitra report went on to say: “Modern science” was introduced to India under the shadow of British colonialism. This was the period when the structures, foundations and guidelines for science were laid down. As the British founded the first universities in the late 19th century and imposed English education, which was rapidly appropriated and propagated by the Indian elite, more and more training was received in Europe and Indians were directed into scientific lines of enquiry laid down by the West in the institutions that followed Western design. 9 Transnational technoscience, as this report and several other texts illustrate , seems to be trapped in a betwixt and between position. On the one hand, the shifting transnational geography of technoscience is making Euro/West-centric categories and historiography untenable. On the other hand, Eurocentric historicism, which constitutes all history within the temporal order of “first in Europe/the West and then elsewhere,” continues to undergird analyses and imaginaries of transnational technoscience.10 I use the phrase “imperial technoscience” to highlight the contradictory and ambivalent folding of Euro/West-centrism with emergent and unpredictable features of technoscience. Euro/West-centrism is not simply a discursive category that comes into play when the West/Europe constitutes the non-West as its “other.” Rather, it is parasitic to a broader and multilayered hierarchical constitution of epistemology, culture, and historiography of science. I call these hierarchical attributes of science “imperial” because they not only exclude but also appropriate the “other” at every level of technoscientific practice.11 Although the imperial features of science do not necessarily overdetermine the emergent aspects of technoscientific practice, these two contradictory characteristics are commonly folded together, and this becomes most starkly evident in the context of transnational technoscientific practices, often in the form of Euro/West-centrism.12 The paucity of transnational studies of particular technosciences, such as those of MRI, has resulted either in ignoring this contradiction or in reinforcing contradictory alignments with Euro/West-centrism, as is evident in Introduction 3 the Sitra report discussed above...