Reviewed by: Biomedical Odysseys: Fetal Cell Experiments from Cyberspace to China by Priscilla Song Janelle Lamoreaux Priscilla Song, Biomedical Odysseys: Fetal Cell Experiments from Cyberspace to China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. 320 pp. What motivates patients to undergo experimental medical procedures transnationally, and what motivates scientists to conduct such treatments on foreign patients? How do national socio-economic histories, values, and scientific regulations shape transnational experimental treatment seeking practices in today’s stratified medical landscapes? Priscilla Song’s book, Biomedical Odysseys: Fetal Cell Experiments from Cyberspace to China, addresses these questions and more through an ethnographic exploration of transnational science and medicine. While fetal cell treatments for spinal cord injuries (SCI) in China are the central focus of her book, Song’s ethnography travels through the virtual and lived experiences of a variety of patients who seek “cutting edge” treatments for life-altering and life-threatening diseases, as well as the physician-scientists who treat them. Guided by an effort to take the hope of patients and the doctors who treat them seriously, Song’s overarching argument is that only by understanding the experiences of those engaged in experimental medicine can we assess the complicated ethical and technological landscapes in which transnational treatments are sought and performed. The book is comprised of three methodologically and topically distinct parts. Part 1, “Online Mediations,” investigates the role of the Internet in mobilizing those with SCI and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) to assess and undertake experimental medicine abroad. In Chapter 2, Song explores how “new forms of mobility that might otherwise be lost in the offline, visceral world of physical paralysis” (48) take form through virtual worlds—particularly via a website called CareCure. Song stresses the importance of online communities in not only physically mobilizing patients [End Page 1439] to travel to China, but also in emotionally supporting one another through questioning and reflecting upon the experimental dimensions of treatment procedures. Chapter 3 explores how illness chronicity and embodiment inform health-seeking practices online through a comparison of people with ALS and SCI. Chapter 4, “Where the Virtual Becomes Visceral,” functions as a bridge to the second section of the book. Here, Song describes the experiences of patients who journey to China for experimental treatments, with special attention paid to transnational discrepancies in hospital facilities, caregiving practices, and the ethics of abortion. The second part of the book, “Chinese Experiments,” focuses on practices of experimental medicine in Beijing, where physician-scientist Huang Hongyun has treated hundreds of patients, both domestic and foreign, with olfactory ensheathing glial cells. As Song’s title suggests, these are fetal cells, derived from the tissue of fetuses aborted during the second trimester of pregnancy (84). While Song dedicates some space to a discussion of the role abortion politics play in the regulation and availability of experimental fetal cell treatments in the US and China (84–91), this is not her focus. Song avoids problematic tropes of China as the wild East of biology or an ethical or regulatory vacuum (Ong and Chen 2010, Zhang 2012), circumventing such characterizations by attending to the way Huang’s ethical imperatives and treatment practices have been shaped by scientific nationalism and medical entrepreneurialism. Chapter 5 provides an in-depth history of China’s health care reforms over the past century. Chapter 6 explores subjectivity under “socialism with Chinese Characteristics” through what Song calls “borderline tactics.” She describes these entrepreneurial tactics as activities “that navigate a precarious line” between legality and illegality (141), complicated by frequently shifting regulations and state agendas that “selectively authorize the pursuit of self-interest” (132). Based on this content, the book’s second section is likely the most pertinent for anthropologists of China. Part 3, “Heterogeneous Evidence,” is to me the most interesting section. In Chapter 7, “Seeking Truth from Facts,” Song carefully contests universal standards of efficacy through an ethnography of Huang’s alternative approach to evidence-based medicine. Song’s ethnographic research, conducted in the hallways, offices, and operating rooms of Huang’s clinic, brings insight into questions about what counts as evidence in current biomedical research regimes, and how what passes as fact does or does not map onto ideas of truth. This...
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Jun 19, 2018
Cristiana Montemagni + 3
Open Access
