In Fungible Life Aihwa Ong explores the dynamic world of cutting-edge bioscience research, offering critical insights into the complex ways Asian bioscientific worlds and cosmopolitan sciences are entangled in a tropical environment brimming with the threat of emergent diseases. At biomedical centers in Singapore and China scientists map genetic variants, disease risks, and biomarkers, mobilizing ethnicized "Asian" bodies and health data for genomic research. Their differentiation between Chinese, Indian, and Malay DNA makes fungible Singapore's ethnic-stratified databases that come to "represent" majority populations in Asia. By deploying genomic science as a public good, researchers reconfigure the relationships between objects, peoples, and spaces, thus rendering "Asia" itself as a shifting entity. In Ong's analysis, Asia emerges as a richly layered mode of entanglements, where the population's genetic pasts, anxieties and hopes, shared genetic weaknesses, and embattled genetic futures intersect. Furthermore, her illustration of the contrasting methods and goals of the Biopolis biomedical center in Singapore and BGI Genomics in China raises questions about the future direction of cosmopolitan science in Asia and beyond.
- Cover
- Contents
- Prologue: Enigmatic Variations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Inventing a City of Life
- Part I. Risks
- 1. Where the Wild Genes Are
- 2. An Atlas of Asian Diseases
- 3. Smoldering Fire
- Part II. Uncertainties
- 4. The Productive Uncertainty of Bioethics
- 5. Virtue and Expatriate Scientists
- 6. Perturbing Life
- Part III. Known Unknowns
- 7. A Single Wave
- 8. “Viruses Don’t Carry Passports”
- 9. The “Athlete Gene” in China’s Future
- Epilogue: A DNA Bridge and an Octopus’s Garden
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- Q
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- X
- Y
- Z
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
Login to your account