Building Biophysics Through Launching Sounding Rockets

Abstract

This chapter explores how leading Chinese biophysicists chose to advance their discipline through launching biological sounding rockets. The participation of biophysicists in Chinese space and rocketry program, liangdan yixing, signified the ways in which leading biophysicists found ways to incorporate the appropriate technologies into specific institutional contexts. What this chapter discusses is how the technology that was available shaped what the individuals with knowledge of biophysics could do to meet the needs of their institutional benefactors. Ultimately meeting this need for their expertise is what granted the biophysicists the resources to build and develop the discipline. The specifics of the construction of biophysics in China are examined in this chapter through the history of the launching of the biological rockets between 1958 and 1966. The guiding questions of this chapter concern how biophysicists negotiated their roles in the space program as well as what the space mission meant to biophysics as a discipline.