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The two themes mentioned in the title of Asian Biotech are popular with both academics and the general public. Editors Aihwa Ong and Nancy Chen flag ethics as the key concept for understanding local operations of science and technology, and they contextualize the rise of biotechnology in Asia within the region's dramatic economic fluctuations.
In her introduction, Aihwa Ong proposes the idea of "situated ethics" as a way to look into the complex intertwining of science and Asian societies. In contrast to considering science and technology as "being everywhere and nowhere all at once" (p. 32), situated ethics is an anthropological approach to biotechnology that focuses on cultural differences in ethical reasoning. This approach looks at such reasoning not just on an individual basis, but within collectives of various scales - kinship, ethnicity, and nation - that in their practice of ethics constitute "communities of fate."
Fittingly, the chapters are on-the-ground studies; they aim to capture, both theoretically and ethnographically, a "transcendental moment in Asian scientific experimentation" (p. 43). Nancy Chen's afterword, though brief, reaffirms the significance of this moment. It describes the dynamic forces operating between biotechnology and society: the generation of knowledge, property and consumption on the one hand, and regulatory dimensions like biosecurity and governance on the...