As part of my doctoral research on learning, identity, and history from an activity-theoretic perspective, I examined the science of artificially making salmon in British Columbia. It was certainly hard work going through boxes of policy documents, technical reports, and official/private letters at the archives but I do recall slowly becoming aware of two seemingly contradictory phenomena. On the one hand, I observed the deep commitment of everyone involved in saving the icon of the Pacific Northwest—the collapse of these fish would bring local culture and economy to its knees. On the other hand, I lost my naivety in thinking that science and conservation efforts were spared from socio-political influences. One pundit made the wisecrack that saving the salmon on the west coast of Canada should really be a lot easier and free from the present bureaucratic morass, for here we have five species of Pacific salmon under the jurisdiction of one province while on the opposite coast there are five provinces protecting a single species of Atlantic salmon! I found this hilarious and revealing of the inherent complexities in trying to achieve a common goal with many interested stakeholders; who ultimately speaks for the salmon? Lest it be misunderstood, my story draws attention to an equally pressing situation in this editorial, ‘‘Who speaks for science education research in Asia?’’ The simplistic, but by no means simple answer is that every science educator working in Asia or someone who is tackling some science education issue within this region can speak. Whereas these educators are cognizant that they provide an important voice to the rest of the world about their successes stories (as well as failures), their total research output lags far behind that of other players in the field. If we were to judge national research productivity by publication output among the three highest ISI-ranked science education journals, Taiwan was the sole Asian state that appeared at least thrice during the years 1998–2002 in the top-ten list of nations (Tsai and Wen 2005). China and Singapore