Gregory Clancey

Intelligent Island to Biopolis: Smart Minds, Sick Bodies and Millennial Turns in Singapore

This essay tells a cultural and political history of biomedicine in Singapore. It takes as its starting point the ‘Intelligent Island’ discourse of the 1990s. It argues not for continuity but dissonance between the two projects, while embedding them in local as well as global cultural politics. Singapore’s adaptation of biomedicine was more than an economic decision, and has had more than economic consequences.

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. 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 theAsia 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-

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima.

In this issue of The Lancet, three Series papers and a Viewpoint commemorate 70 years of caring for survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the more recent extension of that care to those aff ected by the Fukushima nuclear accident. As a result of this unwelcome triple legacy, Japan has become a uniquely important site for understanding radiation-related health eff ects and the aftermath and eff ects of nuclear accidents. As the From Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Fukushima Series makes clear, the three Japanese locations are linked by more than tragedy. The events of 1945 shaped institutions and research programmes that came to play a major part in Fukushima prefecture 66 years later. 70 years after the end of World War 2, the monitoring of Japanese atomic bomb survivors, known as hibakusha, for radiation-related health problems continues. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were the beginnings of a long and deep engagement by Japanese people and institutions with radiation health. Ironically, the two rebuilt cities, and especially their universities, became global centres of research and expertise on radiation health with medical communities that have a unique responsibility towards survivors. Indeed, one of the fi rst and most infl uential Japanese chroniclers of hibakusha and their suff erings, Takashi Nagai, was a radiologist and himself a survivor who succumbed to radiation poisoning. Experts from both cities, some of them descendants of A-bomb survivors, have also been involved since 1986 in monitoring health in the former USSR after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Given this legacy, medical personnel from Hiroshima and Nagasaki were among the fi rst to arrive at the Fukushima disaster site, and many have stayed on to buttress expertise at the Fukushima Medical University, which is now a leading centre for health care after nuclear accidents. Experience from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as Chernobyl, has had a direct bearing on the Fukushima Health Management Survey, a long-term monitoring plan of the aff ected population modelled on the treatment of post-war hibakusha. There are now at least 350 000 individuals to be followed over their lifespans for eff ects of low-dose radiation. The linkages between Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima are thus more than just symbolic, having shaped current health management practices and the institutions that run them, as well as public responses to these events. The contexts of 1945 and 2011 are clearly very diff erent, and intervening events have also shaped current discourse about Fukushima. The post-war introduction of nuclear energy to Japan was initially distant from medical discussion, given Cold War concerns with nuclear weaponry. During this time attitudes were also infl uenced by the Lucky Dragon incident of 1954—when Japanese fi shermen aboard the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon) were aff ected by a US hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll—from which Japanese antinuclear activism can be dated. A series of large industrial pollution incidents in the 1950s and 1960s, along with the subsequent occurrence of small nuclear plant accidents, have also kept the spectre of radiation-related public health crises before the Japanese public. More recently, there has been growing controversy about the overuse of medical radiation technologies in Japan. The legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has nonetheless been a lens through which these and subsequent events have been fi ltered. For the Japanese medical community, a clear diff erence between the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that of Fukushima has been the crisis of communication and trust with the general population. At the local and clinical level, doctors and nurses in Fukushima were dedicated and heroic fi rst-responders, but had little training for a radiation-related disaster. See Editorial page 403

Radiation Disaster Medicine Curriculum Revisited in a Post-Fukushima Context

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has a distinctive mandate to “accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health, and prosperity throughout the world.” The Division of Human Health (NAHU) of the IAEA recognizes education and research as key components of “readiness, response, and recovery” with respect to a major nuclear accident. In this chapter, we address ongoing efforts of NAHU to foster a more comprehensive Science and Technology Studies (STS) approach to creating and mobilizing new knowledge of radiation medicine. This includes promoting collaborative education and research programs and policies based on lessons from the Fukushima accident. NAHU is playing an instrumental role in this process. We discuss results from a consultancy meeting on “Global Radiation Medicine: Educational Challenges for Academia,” which used a focus group methodology. Two STS-oriented projects are being implemented as an outcome of this meeting. The first aims to enhance global radiation medicine education by building capacity among physicians, health professionals, and medical students. The second project aims to strengthen research cooperation in radiation disaster medicine, including the psychosocial consequences of disasters. NAHU mobilizes both international and Japanese STS and disaster studies experts as a way to integrate outsider and insider perspectives on the Fukushima recovery process and draw on the contributions of health professionals, medical students, and specialists from relevant fields such as sociology, anthropology, history, and psychology.

The Human Proteome and the Chinese Liver

The Human Liver Proteome Project (HLPP) is the largest international scientific research project ever headquartered in China. At the same time, the HLPP is one component of the global Human Proteome Project (HPP), which in 2001–2002 began dividing the organs and systems of the human body between different national laboratories and institutes. Research on the kidney was assigned to Japan, brain research to Germany, liver research to China, etc. Only in China, however, did the project take on the character of ‘big science’, successfully competing with other scientific initiatives for funding and prestige at the highest level, and developing ‘national’ characteristics similar to that of genomics research in the United States. Our article considers this flagship Chinese bioscience project from two complementary angles: as ‘big science’ at the cutting edge of biomedical research, and as a discursive and practice-oriented meeting ground between modern and ‘traditional’ Chinese medicine. We also discuss how these strands are politically and philosophically convergent.

Introduction: Asian Biopoleis—Biomedical Research in ‘The Asian Century’

In early 2010, a group of us at the National University of Singapore (NUS) began focusing on the phenomenon of biomedical research in East and South-east Asia, a topic which until then had evoked surprisingly little interest among local social scientists or humanities scholars despite the enthusiasm of colleagues in medicine and life sciences. Organised under the banner ‘Asian Biopoleis’, our project has, over time, enlisted researchers from countries throughout the region and around the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, China and Taiwan, Thailand, Germany, the Netherlands, India, Denmark, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland and Australia, as well as Singapore. Some collaborators were drawn into our orbit because they were already working on Singapore’s Biopolis (our premier collection of biomedical research facilities) as subject and field site. Others were induced to come here on the strength of our project, particularly its opportunities for funding. By ‘us’ we mean a core (though expanding) group of social science and humanities scholars associated with the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) Cluster at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), the largest STS research centre in South-east Asia, and the only one operating at an English-language Asian university. Asian Biopoleis soon became the ‘flagship’ project around which Singapore’s STS community, with otherwise diverse research interests, literally clustered. Now in its third and last year of funding under a Ministry of Education grant, the project looks set to continue on its own initiative, given the momentum established by three years of intense, productive and wide-ranging scholarship, and the ever-increasing presence of bioscience in this and other Asian societies.

Editorial Introduction: Technologies, Lives and Futures in Asia

THIS ISSUE OF Science, Technology, and Society signals a coming-of-age in Singaporebased STS scholarship, with all of its authors either working in Singapore or cycling through as visiting scholars. Singapore is not just an excellent subject and setting for STS research, but is emerging as a base (and partnering site) for such research elsewhere in Asia. A number of factors have conspired in the past couple of years to make this happen. One was the founding of two cooperative STS ‘research clusters’ at the National University of Singapore (NUS), one by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and the other by the university-level Asia Research Institute. With dozens of faculty members from several disciplines collaborating, and funding available for visiting scholars, Singapore has emerged as the main English-language site for STS research and teaching in Asia outside of India. The city–state has also benefi ted from being at the geographic nexus of three other dynamic STS communities—that of India, the ‘East Asian STS Network’ (a recent coming-together of scholars in the STS communities of Japan, South Korea, China and Taiwan) and that of Australasia. With equally strong ties to North America and Europe, Singapore’s community is well-positioned to help make STS a more global domain by creating a larger and more accessible literature from and about Asia. The decision of this journal to increase its yearly issues from two to three manifests a similar commitment. With Asia increasingly full of laboratories, clinical trials, science policy papers, new devices, claims to discovery, funds for

Dangerous, Disruptive, or Irrelevant? History (of Technology) as an Acquired Taste in Asia

This article is the transcript of a round-table talk delivered at the 2011 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) in Cleveland, Ohio. It considers the paradox that the close identification of “Asia” with “technology,” globally as well as within Asia, has not been paralleled by a strong research program in the humanities and social sciences to understand this relationship, particularly its cultural ramifications. It outlines reasons for this, particularly in regard to teaching and research in the history of technology, and suggests that the recent rise of interest in STS in Asia represents a path forward.

Disasters as Change Agents: Three Earthquakes and Three Japans

��� IntheaftermathoftherecentJapanesetsunamiIwasaskedforinterviewsbyanumber of Southeast Asian broadcast journalists because I had written a book on Japanese earthquakes. Most of them politely gave me their questions in advance. This was not just politeness, of course, because writing out all one’s questions in advance predetermines the course of the interview, constructing a narrative ahead of the conversation. One narrative that I was continually invited to contribute to could be called “the admirable stoicism of the Japanese in the face of natural disaster.” My role as a historian, I was signaled, was to help viewers or listeners understand how the long historyofearthquakes,disaster,andsimplyhardshiphadinuredtheJapanesepeopleto sublime misfortune. One interviewer (who had an undergraduate degree in history) actually asked me to begin in the Tokugawa period and tell viewers how each successive period and its crises had made the Japanese more stoical. Another wanted me to explicitly contrast the behavior of the Japanese with that of other peoples who had faced similar crises and (supposedly) had not behaved so admirably (he mentioned Haitians and the citizens of New Orleans). I did my best in every interview to complicate the narrative of a unitary Japanese people inured to crisis, but to no avail. I mentioned, for instance, that the mayor of a northern town had complained of the slow response of the central government, whom he claimed was leaving elderly residents of the town to die. I reminded reporters that therehadbeenastringofnuclearaccidentsinJapanandthatthereweremanyactivists (and just regular people) who deeply mistrusted the nuclear industry even before the disaster.IsuggestedthatthesameJapanesewhoappearedstoicalontelevisionscreens today would punish the ruling party at the polls tomorrow if it did not perform well in thiscrisis.Thefishingvillages mostaffectedbythedisaster,Imentioned,were indeed used to hardship, and could weather the crisis as fishing and farming villages around theworldhaveweatheredcrises forcenturies.ButtheywereonlyoneofmanyJapans. In any case, any comment that I made which could be construed as complicating the narrative of a unified stoical people was edited out of my eventual appearances on

Vast Clearings: Emergency, Technology, and American De-Urbanization, 1930–1945

This article is one step toward an urban history of the United States that foregrounds “emergency” as a clearing device. American cities were strategically targeted during the sustained mid-twentieth century depression and war by a complex of groups – the Federal government, corporations, professional organizations, and universities – who coordinated survival largely at the expense of existing urban fabric. Together they invented “the house” as a new type of space – at once national, masculine, and high-tech – whose connection to urban densities was casual if not inherently confrontational. “The house” was only the beginning of an emergency response that would eventually declare cities “blighted,” and hence susceptible to large-scale winnowing.