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

Conclusion: Looking Back/Moving Forward

Conclusion: Looking Back/Moving Forward In the first half of the 20th century the UK, Germany, and France dominated the sciences. The U.S. emerged as the world leader after the second world war. Now, I believe, we will begin to see as many Nobel prize winners from Asia as we do from the U.S. and Europe. —David Pendlebury, 2011 1 Although I describe Captain Cook as being the first man to discover Hawaii, I know that Polynesians beat him to it by several thousand years. But what makes Cook “great” is that he travelled all the way to them before they thought of travelling to us. —Steve Pope, So That’s Why They Call It Great Britain, 2009 [The 1960s roots of Gatorade] can be traced to the sun-scorched University of Florida and its football team—the Gators. . . . It is a great story, and it is wonderfully fitting for an American icon. But there is an interesting missing link. . . . Earlier in the 1960s . . . Western doctors who went to Bangladesh and elsewhere to help stem [a cholera] epidemic were surprised to discover a centuries-old local treatment for the severe diarrhea caused by cholera. . . . The success of the treatment was covered by the British medical journal Lancet and made its way to a doctor at the University of Florida. —Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, Reverse Innovation: Create Far from Home, Win Everywhere, 2012 The Manchester Guardian’s 2011 headline “Nobel Prizes: Asian Scientists Set to Topple America’s Run of Wins” may seem premature, but it no longer sounds implausible.2 In fact, its discursive presence reflects a recent dramatic shift in the transnational geography of technoscience.3 Yet, even in this new era of transnational technoscience, Euro/West-centrism and the West versus non-West divide continue to inflect both technocultural imaginaries 116 Conclusion and technoscientific practices. Such a discursive framing is evident in, for example, a functional MRI study of Chinese and Korean medicine: The development of oriental medicine [in China and Korea] is relatively slow and still relies on ancient literature which is largely descriptive rather than quantitative or even factual. . . . In oriental medicine, acupuncture treatment was believed to treat directly the diseased organs or related disorders without intermediary control mechanisms. . . . In Western medicine, however, it is known that many disorders are either controlled or affected by the brain, i.e., specific corresponding brain functional areas. 4 Studies like the one discussed above are ideal exemplifications of hybrid knowledges that are produced by, and also produce, conjugated subjects. However, it is also important to note that “fact claims” of Chinese or Korean medicine are presented as having value only in reference to “Western” practices (otherwise, they are seen as antiquated and thus as ethnoscience). The influence of Euro/West-centrism is neither rare nor restricted to noncritical studies of science. It has inflected even those studies which have critiqued and attempted to transcend the West versus non-West divide. The discipline of science and technology studies (STS), for example, has consistently argued against dualist and linear constitution of “modern science.” It has shown that science is multiple, contingent on sociotechnical contexts, and emergent. Nevertheless, as we saw in the introduction to Imperial Technoscience , several STS scholars have ended up resurrecting the West versus non-West divide. Although the recent shift in the transnational geography of technoscience offers us an opportunity to move beyond Euro/West-centric constructions , such a move requires not only that we deconstruct Eurocentrism and retool our analytics, but also that we radically reorient our technoscientific imaginary, which, at the very least, continues to ignore the pervasive influence of Eurocentrism.5 Moreover, it requires as well that we unravel the largely invisible, yet centuries-old genealogies of transnational technosciences . Toward that end, let us briefly consider two Eurocentric constructions that have played crucial roles in obscuring, if not erasing, the complex and vibrant genealogies of transnational technosciences. Eurocentric appropriation of transnational technosciences is, in part, parasitic to a conflation of two different regimes of “invention,” which has allowed a homogeneous and exclusive framing of the European inventive spirit and, indeed, of European/Western exceptionalism as well. Why should travel to a place, even when it is not for the “absolute” first time— as was the case with James Cook and Hawaii, and also with Christopher Looking Back/Moving Forward 117 Columbus and America—be called a “discovery”? Interestingly, such discursive...