Medical Tourism, Stem Cells, Genomics: EASTS, Transnational STS, and the Contemporary Life Sciences

Medical Tourism, Stem Cells, Genomics: EASTS, Transnational STS, and the Contemporary Life Sciences Charis Thompson Received: 1 December 2008 /Accepted: 1 December 2008 / Published online: 20 January 2009 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2009 In May 2008, I had the pleasure and privilege of giving a talk at National Taiwan University on the occasion of the first anniversary of EASTS, the East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal. I have been following the journal since its inception, so in my talk, I presented a number of cases from my recent research considered in the light of how EASTS provides resources for analyzing the kind of material with which I have been grappling. In particular, I situated my talk in relation to the exciting position paper by Daiwie Fu in the first issue, “How Far Can East Asian STS Go?” that takes up the question of regional identity, postcoloniality, and deterritorialization. It is also in conversation with the important introduction by Dung-Shen Chen and Chia-Ling Wu on the links between democracy, public participation (including dissent), civil society, and technoscience throughout the East Asian region and beyond. In this comment, I will summarize the main points of my talk: what the journal offers me as a US-based STS scholar working on topics that refuse neat regional or national bounding, and how that might be applied to make sense of some actual examples. Picking up on the themes from Fu, Chen, and Wu, EASTS, offers three things that I have already found extremely helpful. First, the journal provides timely publication in English of empirically and historically grounded papers on East Asian science and technology. There is still relatively little Science & Technology Studies scholarship in English about East Asian cases. Scholarship on East Asian science and technology from such nearby disciplines as the history of science and political science tends to be marked by highly problematic meta-narratives that are obsessed with science and technology as an historical index of the rise and fall of civilizations, or of a putative contemporary distinction between inventive metropoles of the West and rapid follower metropoles of the East. The fact that these narratives are often also “actors’ categories,” fuelling nationalisms in East Asia as elsewhere, is part of what the journal brings under scrutiny. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2008) 2:433–438 DOI 10.1007/s12280-008-9056-3 C. Thompson (*) UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail: charis@berkeley.edu Second, EASTS is a journal editorially centered in East Asia but participating in and furthering an academic economy dominated by and productive of global English speakers and readers. This makes non-optional the geographic, historic, economic, militaristic, and rhetorical imbrications of East Asia with the rest of the world, as well as with supra-national imaginaries such as that of the “global” and “the academy”. Given how central science educational diasporas are to East Asia, and how important East Asian students and faculty are to Western, especially US, scientific institutions’ rankings, to fail to acknowledge these aspects of science internationalism would be to completely miss the character of modern science. This mutual imbrication of regions is a crucial step for STS practitioners to take. Third, the journal promises an invigoration of the kinds of terms that dominate thinking about transnational geopolitics in the English-speaking academy, such as “post-colonial,” and “neoliberal,” and “empire;” and related analytics for talking about subjectivity and agency in relation to science and technology, such as “from below,” “expert,” and “user.” The multi-territorializations of East Asia (as elsewhere, I would argue, but see below) refuse flattening, however, so it is not a question of following flat networks innocent of recalcitrant power dynamics. There may be no single center-periphery, but neither is the region (or any other) beyond centerperiphery dynamics. Global finance has center-periphery dynamics in East Asia and beyond. So does ICT. So does stem cell research. So do nuclear weapons. So does science education. But they reference several different, changing, and often related, center-periphery histories and movements of material, people, and ideas. Conceptual innovation in this area promises to be of great interest to those in the...