China as an ‘Emerging Biotech Power’

Abstract

Asia's dramatic entry on to the global biotech scene has not gone unnoticed by commentators and social scientists. Countries like China, India, South Korea and Singapore have been identified as ‘emerging biotech powers’. Consequently scholars have begun examining the particularities of how biotechnologies (eg stem cell science, genetic testing and reproductive medicine) have come to be taken up and grounded in a variety of cultural, legal and socioeconomic contexts. They have also examined how governments, scientists, clinicians and others have been engaged in efforts to build up endogenous biotech sectors as a part of nation-building strategies. In this article, rather than attempting to answer questions of what makes biotechnology particularly Asian, I will instead investigate how demarcations and boundaries are mooted in global negotiations of what constitutes ‘good’ biotechnology. The analysis is based on a collaborative project between Chinese and European scientists and experts on the ethical governance of biomedical and biological research. I show how an underlying condition for the negotiations that took place within this collaboration was the proposition that difference matters when it comes to developing, organising, carrying out and overseeing biotechnological research in a particular country.

Acknowledgements

From 2007 to 2009 I was Research Fellow for the Bionet project, based at the BIOS Centre, London School of Economics. I gratefully acknowledge all Bionet partners as well as the funders of Bionet which included the European Commission Sixth Framework Programme (FP6), the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council (MRC) and the Wellcome Trust.

Notes

1 See A Bharadwaj & P Glasner, Local Cells, Global Science: The Rise of Embryonic Stem Cell Research in India, London: Routledge, 2009; H Gottweis (ed), ‘Biopolitics in Asia’, special issue of New Genetics and Society, 28(3), 2009; D Reubi, ‘The will to modernize: a genealogy of biomedical research ethics in Singapore’, International Political Sociology, 4, 2010, pp 142–158; A Ong & N Chen (eds), Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010; K Sunder Rajan, Biocapital: The Constitution of Post-Genomic Life, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006; and B Salter & C Waldby (eds), ‘Biopolitics in China’, special issue of East Asian Science, Technology and Society, 5(3), 2011.

2 National Science Foundation, Asia's Rising Science and Technology Strength, Arlington, VA: Division of Science Resources Statistics, National Science Foundation, 2007.

3 Gottweis, ‘Biopolitics in Asia’, pp 203–204.

4 Bharadwaj & Glasner, Local Cells, Global Science, p 20.

5 Ong & Chen, Asian Biotech, p 5.

6 W-C Sung, ‘Chinese dna: genomics and bionation’, in Ong & Chen, Asian Biotech, pp 263–292.

7 C Thompson, ‘Asian regeneration? Nationalism and internationalism in stem cell research in South Korea and Singapore’, in Ong & Chen, Asian Biotech, pp 95–117.

8 A Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

9 See the following reports for summaries of Bionet's work: Bionet, Informed Consent in Reproductive Genetics and Stem Cell Technology and the Role of Ethical Review Boards, first workshop report, Peking University Health Science Centre, Beijing, 1–5 April 2007; Bionet, Ethical Governance of Reproductive and Stem Cell Research and Stem Cell Banks, second workshop report, cas-mpg Partner Institute for Computational Biology in cooperation with the Shanghai Medical Ethics Association, Shanghai, 9–11 October 2007; Bionet, Ethical Governance of Reproductive Technologies, Therapeutic Stem Cells and Stem Cell Banks, conference report, Institute of Reproduction and Stem Cell Engineering, Central South University & Reproductive and Genetic Hospital, citic-Xiangya, Changsha, 1–3 April 2008; Bionet, Clinical Research and Clinical Research Organisations in EU–CN Research—Ethics and Governance Issues, third workshop report, Research Center for Bioethics, Peking Union Medical College & Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Xi'an, 9–12 September 2008; Bionet, Biobanking & Personal Genomics: Challenges and Futures for EU–China Collaborations, fourth workshop report, Beijing Genomics Institute at Shenzhen, Shenzhen, 27–29 April 2009; Bionet, Recommendations on Best Practice in the Ethical Governance of Sino-European Biological and Biomedical Research Collaborations, Bionet Expert Group Report, London: London School of Economics, 2010; and Bionet, Ethical Governance of Biological and Biomedical Research: Chinese–European Co-operation—Final Report, London: London School of Economics, 2010, all available at http://www2.lse.ac.uk/BIOS/research/BIONET/.

10 N Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

11 I have chosen not to identify the persons from whom the quotes that follow are taken. Information on the composition and participation of Bionet workshops can be found in the various workshop reports, at http://www2.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/units/BIONET/. What I am analysing here are the contours of the negotiations that I observed and recorded during these events as opposed to ascribing a certain ‘view’ to an individual or institution. It is the negotiations that are the object of my analysis here.

12 See Bionet reports at footnote 9.

13 K Sunder Rajan, ‘The experimental machinery of global clinical trials: case studies from India’, in Ong & Chen, Asian Biotech, pp 55–80.

14 A Jack & A Yee, ‘China overtakes India in drug testing’, Financial Times, 27 August 2007.

15 Reubi, ‘The will to modernize’.

16 A scandal surrounding the faking of data in the development of Motorola-chips at Jiaotong University.

17 A Petryna, ‘Clinical trials offshored: on private sector science and public health’, BioSocieties, 2(1), 2007, pp 21–40; and Petryna, ‘Ethical variability: drug development and the globalization of clinical trials’, American Ethnologist, 32, 2005, pp 183–197.

18 See also Sunder Rajan, Biocapital.

19 See, for example, A Petryna, When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009; P Geissler, KA Wenzel, B Imoukhuede & R Pool, ‘“He is now like a brother, I can even give him some blood”—relational ethics and material exchanges in a malaria vaccine “trial community” in The Gambia’, Social Science and Medicine, 67(5), 2008, pp 696–707; and CS Molyneux, DR Wassenaar, N Peshu & K Marsh, ‘“Even if they ask you to stand by a tree all day, you will have to do it (laughter)!”—community voices on the notion and practice of informed consent for biomedical research in developing countries’, Social Science and Medicine, 61(2), 2005, pp 443–454.

20 US Government, ‘Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No 10’, Vol 2, Nuremberg, October 1946–April 1949, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1949, pp 181–182.

21 This observation is not unique to China as similar points have been made in other countries, especially where research takes place in rural areas or so-called ‘resource-poor’ settings. See P Geissler, KA Wenzel & C Molyneux (eds), Evidence, Ethos and Experiment: The Anthropology and History of Medical Research in Africa, New York: Berghahn Books, 2011.

22 An important component of the Bionet project was an Expert Group co-chaired by Prof Christoph Rehmann-Sutter and Prof Qiu Renzong, whose remit it was to prepare recommendations on best practice in the ethical governance of Sino-European biomedical research collaborations. See Bionet, Recommendations on Best Practice in the Ethical Governance of Sino-European Biological and Biomedical Research Collaborations.

23 Ibid, pp 46–47.

24 Escobar, Territories of Difference, pp 310–311.