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During the first decade of the twenty-first century, a network composed of politicians, regulators, bioscientists, clinical researchers, and Chinese medicine specialists has emerged that seeks to bridge an imagined gulf between the modern West and ancient China in order to create a new type of personalized medicine. The central building block of this bridge is the Chinese medical concept of zheng, variously translated into English as syndrome, pattern, or type. My paper places side by side two different genealogies of how zheng assumed this central role. The first genealogy examines the process by means of which zheng came to be considered as something shared by both ancient China and cutting-edge biological science and, by extension, how it manages to hold together the entire institutional, political, and economic framework into which this bridge is embedded and which it co-creates. The second genealogy shows zheng to be central to a much older series of redefinitions of Chinese medicine and Chinese medical practice that extend from the eleventh century to the present. Read together, these two genealogies--neither of which should be seen as exhaustive--raise three important issues that are further discussed in the conclusion of the paper. First, I explore how the concept of zheng has come to tie a medical tradition derided by its adversaries for being a pseudoscience to one of the most cutting-edge fields of bioscience research. I ask what is at stake in this synthesis, for whom, and why, and how it transforms Chinese medicine and/or systems biology along the way. Second, I am interested in finding out how and why the very same concept can be at the heart of two apparently agonistic visions of Chinese medicine's future as it is popularly imagined in China today. Finally, I insist that the medical humanities need to become actively involved in the construction of emergent articulations such as the ones I amexploring. Merely writing a history of the present will not be productive unless its critique can somehow be articulated into the very processes of emergence that historians or anthropologists seek to examine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents that the author expresses gratitude to those who have supported the EASTS journal and acknowledges the contributions of the outgoing editor-in-chief, Professor Wen-Hua Kuo. It highlights Professor Kuo's leadership in maintaining a clear vision and creatively leading the journal while strategically managing multiple facets.

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The article offers the author's insight on his career in Korean Science, Technology and Society (STS) community that include teachin, engaging and exploring the potentials of STS in East Asia, which is based on his keynote speech given at the 12th East Asian STS Network Conference in Beijing, China in November 2016. He discussed topics including his involvement with History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) to STS, his educational and career history, and the history of STS in South Korea.

The article reports that history of face masks has become a very popular topic in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for news reporters and public health experts. Topics include why do Asians wear masks despite the lack of scientific evidence which sociologist Mitsutoshi Horii; and Asia's societal and cultural paradigm supports mask-usage hygienic practices without any empirical evidence.

The socially calculated Asian body is an abstract discursive space bridging early twentieth- and twenty-first-century Pan-Asianism across multiple scientific understandings of race and ethnicity. In the early twentieth century, the pan-Asian body was a static, statistical taxonomy of precisely measured blood and body parts. As an administrative tool of empire and nation building, the quantitatively defined Asian was plotted along Cartesian coordinates of racial purity. By the twenty-first century, new computational technologies flexibly supported both national and transcendent pan-Asian ethnic identities by constructing regional populations as dynamic probabilistic clusters over time. This paper focuses on how the Pan-Asian SNP Consortium (PASNP) of the Human Genome Organisation (HUGO), the first inter-Asian genomics collaboration, embodied a revival of Pan-Asianism in both the members' collaborative network and scientific research. As a network of scientists, the PASNP members heralded the spirit of regional cooperation to bring about the rise of a pan- Asian research area in science. Through their research, the members reflexively calculated a new narrative of the shared ethnic origin and genetic unity of the region. Biochip data, probabilistic clustering algorithms, and computer simulations in the hands of Asian scientists calculated that the region was most likely populated as a single wave of historical migration. This overturned the dominant theory supported by Western-led international projects that divided Asian populations. The PASNP thus mapped the metageography of Pan-Asianism through big data computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the emergent new discipline known as chemical biology as part of the rapidly developing postgenomic research agenda. Despite chemical biology's academic as well as political significance in terms of its expected contribution to drug discovery, the international STS community has failed to pay serious attention to its dynamism thus far. The objective of this paper is to fill this gap by conducting a case study on the rapid formation of the Japanese Association of Chemical Biology, which is a global pioneer, in 2006. By bridging different theoretical concerns, namely laboratory studies in STS and the study of policy process, particularly the theory of policy window by Kingdon, this paper analyzes how three different levels--laboratory practices, community of scientists, and policy process-- are mutually constitutive, and why both Japanese scientists and policy makers believe that chemical biology is important both in science and policy. This paper will substantiate the all-encompassing notion of coproductionism given by Jasanoff, by emphasizing more specific instances such as the role of policy entrepreneurs, international competition, and sense of scientific tradition, which are crucial for enabling coproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stem cell science is a modern global form, yet it serves deeply social and often nationalistic visions of the role ofbiotechnology, and its practices and meanings are contingent and situated. In this paper, I show how stem cell research represents a deliberate conjoining of biotechnology and national development in Taiwan. This paper is based on more than a year of ethnographic research conducted in Taiwan between 2005 and 2007 and builds upon Charis Thompson's (2010) comparative analysis of flagship stem cell laboratories in Singapore and South Korea. It is also in conversation with Keller and Samuel's (2003) categorical system that classifies Taiwan as a "technohybrid" located between the "technoglobal" and the "technonational." Here, I argue that while Taiwan's stem cell development incorporates aspects of national, global, and international orientations, these manifest within dynamic and heterogeneous assemblages. Taiwan's national investment in regenerative medicine is a rich site in which to examine visions of a national present and future as well as of Taiwan's place on the stage of global science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on professor John Law and scholar Wen-yuan Lin's paper on provincializing Science and Technology Studies(STS), the principle of symmetry and postcolonial intellectual asymmetries. Topics discussed include Taiwanese STS scholar Hsin-Hsing Chen's experiences at a festival for the goddess Mazu, approach taken by medical anthropologists such as Mario Blaser, Judith Farquhar and Mei Zhan, and Mandarin language terms to express modern scientific and technological, concepts.

The article focuses on professor John Law and scholar Lin Wen-yuan's paper on postcolonial version of the principle of symmetry and Taiwanese Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Chinese medicine. Topics discussed include anthropologist Marilyn Strathern's views on ethnographic moment, central features with lateral analysis emerging at the interface between anthropology and STS, and generalization of postcolonial asymmetries.

The article focuses on views of John Law, Professor of Sociology and Technology Studies at University of Lancaster, on his use of non-Western concepts as Science and Technology Studies (STS) analytical tools. Topics discussed include actor-network theory founded by Law, 2015 Bernal Prize received by Law for his contribution to the field of STS, and STS scholar Wen-yuan Lin and Law's paper on provincializing STS.

This study investigates the widely recognizable discourse that characterizes South Korea as a plastic surgery nation by tracing media coverage of plastic surgery as published in two major Korean newspapers from 1960 to 2009. This study attempts to enrich our understanding of plastic surgery in modern times within the Korean context by delineating three distinctive periods of plastic surgery: legitimization (1960-79), popularization (1980-99), and industrialization (2000s). I show how the discourse of South Korea as a plastic surgery nation is both a local and a global construction. This paper further aims to deepen our understanding of enhancement technology by showing how the plastic surgery discourse in South Korea demonstrates the permeability of the boundaries between therapy and enhancement, bodily and social enhancement, and the individual and collective body. While the discourse has reinforced these complementary and intertwined relationships, what enhancement means for whom has not been questioned. I argue that statistics have variously been used to proclaim the ubiquity of plastic surgery, which works to "make up people" without attending to the actual experiences and effects of plastic surgery, either for individuals or the nation. In this way, the characterization of South Korea as a plastic surgery nation is a dubious construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to articles in this issue is presented including Doctors for Frontier Expansion: Japanese Physicians in Hawaii, 1868-1924, science fiction in South and North Korea and The Making of Power Shortage: The Sociotechnical Imaginary of Nationalist High Modernism.

In this paper, the authors analyze the formation of a network of Indonesian nuclear experts. Their investigation of Indonesia's major institutions of nuclear engineering--the National Nuclear Energy Agency (Badan Tenaga Nuklir Nasional, BAT AN), the Nuclear Energy Regulatory Agency (Badan Pengawas Tenaga Nuklir, BAPETEN), and the Bandung Institute of Technology (Institute of Technology in Bandung, ITB)--reveals a visible Japanese influence in Indonesia. Through extensive interviews with Indonesian nuclear experts, the authors demonstrate the close ties between the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the ITB. This analysis illustrates the firm relationship between the two institutions in an academic nexus, resulting in the formation of the Japan-Indonesia nuclear network. Further, the collective biographies of Indonesian nuclear physicists, including Zaki Su'ud and his followers, show that the tightly woven academic complex between Japan and Indonesia has pushed the transfer of nuclear research from Japan to Indonesia. This collection of ties has led to the establishment of a so-called science community of nuclear engineering in Indonesia by the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The authors argue that this science community forms a subsidiary of Japan's "nuclear village," which has expanded beyond its national boundaries. The authors' research on Japan's technopolitical expansion through the establishment of a science community in Indonesia reveals the manner in which close ties between Japanese and Indonesian academia have been built. The authors suggest that this Japan-Indonesia network should be understood within the context of Japan as a United States techno-imperial sub-system, forming an extension of the US-centered international structure of nuclear engineering in the framework of models proposed by Togo Tsukahara. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including Diagrammatic reasoning; different diagram-based modeling strategies of 19th and 21th-century economists ; and role of visual artifacts in the formation of scientific knowledge.

The article offers information on news briefs related to science and events. The 2019 4S annual meeting—Innovations, Interruptions, Regenerations—EASTS, involve its featured exhibition, titled "Innovating STS," and launched a visual project on its covers, a feature of EASTS that is making East Asian STS both visible and unforgettable; and thematic workshop on food technology in May 2018 with the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong.

The field of engineering ethics emerged in the early 1990s in Taiwan, following the example of the United States, which had developed this field over the previous three decades. The Institute of Engineering Education Taiwan (IEET) recommends that students of engineering schools study engineering ethics so as to acquire an "understanding of professional ethics and social responsibility." For the most part, the scenarios used for teaching are simplistically real or hypothetical ones framed by the codes of ethics, or case studies borrowed directly from the United States. In this paper I argue that adding components of STS studies, especially historical-sociological analyses of real cases to engineering ethics, is beneficial and more consonant with IEET requirements, and I draw on the concepts of STS studies to analyze a local case study as an illustration of this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the influence of historian and scientist Thomas S. Kuhn's book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" on scholars who later emerged as members of the South Korean science, technology and society (STS) communities. Articles in two major Korean databases were examined to show Kuhn's influence on intellectuals in various fields. The continued use of "Structure" for essay assignments for Korean college students is described.

Similar to other modern Western nations, Japan experienced a state of total war during the twentieth century, expanding state intervention in the economy, scientific community, and the bodies of the populace. This article illustrates how Japanese psychiatrists engaged in the production of knowledge and the distribution of government funds via war disablement pensions in response to national demands during the Asia-PacificWar (1931-45). After the Second Sino-JapaneseWar started in July 1937, Kōnodai Military Hospital was converted into a special army hospital for mental and neurological illnesses, admitting about 10,500 patients by the end of the war. Most of the psychiatrists assigned to Kōnodai Military Hospital were elite professionals who went on to be leaders in Japanese psychiatry after the war. It is noteworthy that the main task of these psychiatrists was not only to treat patients but also to make judgments on who would or would not receive war disablement pensions. Their interpretation of what was termed "war neurosis" became closely aligned with the goals of the war disablement pension system and was affected by economic needs during and after the war. This article reveals that wartime economic decision making by the government demanded medical officers to make it clear who deserved a war disablement pension in order to minimize potentially excessive spending on "pension neurosis.". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the philosophy and history of medicine, the public health, and symphony orchestra.

The article presents the discussion on negotiation process with the 4S council and the preparation process in Japan. Topics include number of participants from Africa and Latin America being small, but this Tokyo meeting was outstanding in terms of the number of Asian participants; and international conference making the wider public more aware of the importance of STS research.

This article focuses on the life of medical doctor Kōzō Andō (安藤公三) and his family as My word count now says it is 198 words Japanese citizens in the British Empire, medical practitioners within inter-imperial biomedical frameworks and as intermediaries of Japanese imperialism during the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia in World War II. The Andō family came to settle on the Malay peninsula in the late nineteenth century which was under the control of the British but still part of Japan's nan'yō imaginary. Both Kōzō Andō and his younger brother Jun'ichiro (安藤純一郎) were trained as medical doctors at the King Edward VII Medical College in Singapore, one of the well-regarded training institutions for medicine in the British Empire and Southeast Asia at the time. When Japan invaded Malaya, Kōzō Andō was made Chief Medical Officer of Syonan (Singapore), a position which he held until his retirement and return to Japan in 1943. The life of Kōzō Andō points to his ambiguous situation in Malaya under British and Japanese empires due to his positionality as Japanese, as part of a larger Asian racial category in Malaya, and as a medical doctor in an inter-imperial setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzed the influence of the Hwang scandal on the stem cell research community and research governance systems in South Korea. In contrast to the claims of some critics that the fraud scandalmight raise doubts aboutKorean stem cell science, the impact of theHwang scandal on publications byKorean stem cell researchers in international scientific journals proved limited, with only a temporary halt in research and publications. On the one hand, Korea's scientific community has moved toward the ethical turn through which theKorean government tightened its research-ethics standards and regulations. On the other hand, the government and scientific community remain hopeful about stem cell research. Consequently, the politics of hope have led to the quick recovery of Korean stem cell science from the potential damage caused by the Hwang scandal. The scandal accelerated the South Korean government's efforts toward research ethics reform: it mandated universities and research institutes to create and strengthen institutional review boards and other research-integrity committees. In addition, the Korean government, maintaining its optimism about the economic value of stem cell science, continued to fund stem cell research. Despite the seemingly prompt recovery from the scandal, however, stem cell research governance systems in Korea face a serious new challenge: the ethical and safety concerns associated with the rapid commercialization of stem cell science. Therefore, this article views the changes in the scientific community as a process of conflict and negotiation between the accountability crisis in the Korean scientific community and the politics of hope in science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses the contents within the issue, including articles on topics such as misconduct in research and the role of social and institutional culture in it; stem cell science in South Korea; and Japanese government's prioritization of specific scientific fields.

The article focuses on the relationship between war and medicine, highlighting the historical and contemporary connections between them. Topics include how war has shaped medical discourse and practice, drawing on examples such as the use of military metaphors to conceptualize disease and the redefinition of national security as a medical problem; and changing historiography of the military history of medicine with research on the impact of war on medical progress and healthcare.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the possibility of weaponizing bacteria and waging a biological war became a frequently discussed topic in Europe, America, and Asia. This article traces the discourse on bacteriological warfare (xijunzhan) before, during, and in the aftermath of the Second Sino-Japanese War and puts it in the historical context of the development of biomedical sciences, epidemic prevention, and governance in Republican China. The discussion of biowarfare might be understood as an expression of both the skepticism about the scientization as well as technologization of warfare and the fear of epidemics ravaging China at the time. Considering the prevalence of epidemics in China during the first half of the twentieth century, the horror scenario of biological warfare did not necessarily lead to the direct expansion of or change in actual anti-epidemic measures during the Republican era. However, the very possibility of bacteriological attacks increased the sensitivity and knowledge of decision makers, military personnel, and large parts of the population regarding the threat of infectious disease and epidemics. The dread of enemies dropping vessels filled with disease vectors helped to justify the promulgation and implementation of hygiene protocols, vaccine campaigns, and microbiological knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did the Communist Party of China (CPC) redefine the social and political roles of medicine and doctors as it developed from an illegitimate or minority party to the ruling political power? From the 1930s to the 1960s, decades replete with ideological shifts, political upheavals and wars, the formula CPC developed for its anti-imperial movements and state-building enterprise changed not only the political and economic fundaments of China's statehood, but also people's perception of physician-state-patient relationship. The article will start with a medical dispute that signifies a nostalgic idealization of doctors' social roles in the 21st century. Following an overview of the major shifts in medical regulations that define doctors' roles in the early ROC and the CPC regimes, the discussion then highlights three interrelated elements in CPC's wartime medical experiences: an extremely high standard of morality for medical practitioners; de-commodification of medical services; and mobilization of medical practitioners to support the CPC's political agenda. The CPC's wartime medical experiences at the regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive levels are essential to our understanding of the institutionalization of medicine in the early PRC and the changing physician-state-patient relationship in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on professor John Law and scholar Wen-yuan Lin's paper on provincializing Science and Technology Studies (STS), non-Western medical system and the principle of symmetry. Topics discussed include sociologist Bruno Latour's views on truth and reality, literary critic Barbara Herrnstein Smith's critique of objectivism in epistemology, and cultural translation between historically divided worlds.

Radioactive waste management in Malaysia remains a wicked problem, the result of extracting technoscientific knowledge for techno-economic and industrial science purposes. Early policies were not cognizant of the full extent of these risks. Moreover, wicked problems are complex problems that emerged out of interactions as a result of particular ecological conditions. Postnormal science (PNS) becomes the framework for the negotiation of these complexities. Science-based problem-solving is broadened to include non-science epistemologies, which enables the legitimation of participatory epistemic interventions from lay experts. The problems encountered in radioactive waste management resulted from the high-stake uncertainties involved in measuring and evaluating risks and their causes. Wicked problems arise when there are disagreements over the governance of risk; incomplete information received as a result of obtuseness in the decision-making process, or in the blackboxing of the risks occurrences and mechanisms of predictions; and contextual interpretations of data provided by different expert stakeholders that could culminate into misinformation. Wicked problems in the two cases to be discussed will be considered through these lenses: ambivalence over technoscientific authorities and the structures of (dis)trust, the over-reducibility of complex technoscientific problems, and the difficulties in enacting extended peer review when participatory practices were traditionally excluded from policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how political economic transitions in India have shaped the trajectory of the biotech sector. With the increasing global prominence of biotechnology as a potential tool for economic growth, the Indian state also started prioritizing it. However, under the economic reforms that were initiated starting from the early 1980s, such growth is envisaged through encouraging private sector and public--private partnerships (PPP) while weakening the public sector units (PSU). Employing a political economy framework, we analyze three initiatives, namely Bharat Immunological and Biological Corporation Limited a PSU and Genomed, The Centre for Genomic Applications under PPP model established as first of its kind ventures. Our analysis shows that the PSU established with the mandate of production of affordable vaccines deviated from this role and became a part of the global value chain of vaccine market controlled by the Trans National Corporations. Similarly, the public--private initiatives have been appropriated to cater to the goals of private enterprises at the cost of public resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For hypergrowing Singapore, noise is an issue of everyday life. As a public problem, noise can be very relative because it deeply relates to the level of tolerance, while tolerance to noise is socially conditioned. But in a city where virtually every public issue is subject to technocratic handling, sound and noise are considered techno-environmental problems that require technocratic remedies. Drawing on the growing literature on soundscape and sound studies, this research note seeks to examine how sound and noise are being problematized in the urban spaces of Singapore. Our research note will examine a case of how cross-cutting issues of sound/noise, technology, and livability manifest at the neighborhood-level. In particular, we will draw upon our ethnographic study to explore noise issues in a high density neighborhood in Singapore. Focusing on one high density neighborhood, our study provides interesting insights into the challenges of devising policies/plans for postcolonial modern cities in a state of perpetual flux. It also shows how technocratic handling faces limitations in dealing with urban noise and public responses in the context of changing soundscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on world news briefs. Topics include Professor Fa-ti Fan, EASTS' associate editor and the incumbent president of the History of Science Society (HSS) leading a series of events in Taiwan this June; and Taiwan being caught in a heated debate after a series of discriminatory incidents transpired targeting ethnicity and gender.

The article reports that situational analysis is a qualitative research method rooted in the traditions of grounded theory and pragmatist interactionism. Topics include examines drawing broadly from contemporary social thought, it offers a powerful interdisciplinary approach now widely taken up transnationally and SA was initially developed by Adele E. Clarke, based on decades of teaching and research experience, especially in grounded theory.

This article focuses on data workers in Shenzhen, who, since 2013, have been recruited to fill positions in the city's Weaving the Net program (zhiwang gongcheng, 織網工程). The program, furthering both the expansion of city gridding management techniques and local experiments with China's Social Credit system, is designed to generate a daily set of data to inform the city's "Smart Brain", and is a core way of managing the city's "floating population". In this article, we approach the grid management of Shenzhen and its connection with histories of Chinese social control through data workers themselves. We argue that data workers expand our understanding both the integration of human-technological assemblages into smart city initiatives and the labor of data generation for programs of state social control. Extending STS approaches to smart city infrastructure, we use the figure of the data worker to the present both familiar and distinctive characteristics of Chinese Smart City initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Taipei City Government launched project of automated guideway transit system in the 1980s caused a conflict with the central government's metro project. This conflict drew the intervention of the US government, who invited American transportation consultants to integrate the two transit systems into one. The Brown Line became the only automated metro line of the Taipei Metro. Although the US government had hoped an American company would be the system provider for the Brown Line, Matra's VAL256 won the contract. However, the VAL256 experienced fire and tire explosion accidents, leading to conflicts between Matra and the Taipei City Government. Matra withdrew all its technical supports to pressure Taipei to pay the down payment. Nonetheless, Taiwanese technical officials and engineers modified the system with flexible strategies making the Brown Line work smoothly without Matra's technical support. Later, The Taiwanese technical officials invited Bombardier to provide its CITYFLO system and integrated it with the modified VAL256 into one system, avoiding paying a high price to Matra for the extension of the Brown Line. How the Brown Line became a hybrid metro system shows how technological hybridity can change the power relationship between technologically advanced countries such as France and "catching-up countries" such as Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008, the South Korean government decided to resume importing beef from the United States, which had been stopped since 2003. The government's attempt to reassure citizens with scientific claims met severe resistance, resulting in a whirlwind of political and technoscientific controversies over risks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). This article examines memories of protests in 2008 with two objectives; first, to discuss how sub-politics evolves when matters of concern become matters of fact and second, to better understand the aftermath of Korean BSE controversies. Thirty-eight semi-structured interviews with proponents and opponents of the BSE protests were conducted in 2019 and analyzed. Focusing on the complicated discursive struggles over science, society, and their relations, we demonstrated that, along with what people widely accept as the "facts" about US beef, a modern imaginary of science and politics as two separate spheres was reconstructed in Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the workshop entitled "Prospects in East Asian Science, Technology and Society" during the 2017 4S Annual Meeting of the East Asian Science, Technology and Society (EASTS) that was held in Boston, Massachusetts from August 30 to September 2. Topics discussed include the pollution lawsuits, the growth of the STS scholarship, and the journal's achievements and editorship.