[Sci-tech-public] Wen-Hua Kuo's dissertation defense

[Kris Kipp]

Please join us for Wen-Hua Kuo's dissertation defense:


Japan and Taiwan in the Wake of Bio-Globalization:
Drugs, Race and Standards

Wen-Hua Kuo

Thursday, August 18, 2005

1:00 PM

E51-275



ABSTRACT


This is a study of Japan and Taiwan's different responses to the expansion 
of the global drug industry. The thesis focuses on the problematic of 
"voicing (FASHENG)," of how a state can make its interests heard in the 
International Conference on Harmonization of Technical Requirements for 
Registration of Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH). The ICH is a unique 
project that facilitates the formation of a single global market by 
creating universal standards for clinical trials and drug approvals. 
Tracing, through "slow motion" ethnography, step by step, why Japan claims 
a racial difference requires additional local clinical trials with "Asian 
bodies," this thesis rejects conventional interpretations of protectionism 
for Japan's resistance to globalization. It argues that more than 
protectionism is involved, and that a rich ethnographic understanding of 
Japan's medical infrastructure is required to understand the claim of 
biological, cultural, and national differences, as well as biostatistical 
arguments about the ambiguities of "extrapolation" of clinical data from 
one place to another.

The inherent ambiguities of efforts to create "bridging" studies as a 
temporary solution to these problematics created a deadlock in the ICH, and 
provided an opening for Taiwan, another Asian state, which does not enjoy 
formal recognition from the world, to speak for itself to this conference, 
and to create the fragile, but politically critical, possibility of 
becoming a clinical trial center for Asian populations. The language of 
genomics and biostatistics become in the more recent period the vehicles 
for both Japanese and Taiwanese efforts at "voicing" their concerns. Both 
genomics and biostatistics look different in these contexts than they do 
from the United States or European Union.

In sum, (1) Japan's and Taiwan's (with a briefer look at Singapore) 
response, as well as "global ethnographic objects" such as the ICH, provide 
important tools to rethink the comparative method as well as universalizing 
claims of harmonization. (2) Race, culture, and the nation-state are 
transformed as categories through the contemporary reworkings of genomics 
and biostatistics. (3) The thesis demonstrates that abstract accounts of 
the spread of clinical trials and resistance in various parts of the world 
are not to be trusted unless they include detailed probings of local 
understandings, identity issues, and problems of voicing.





Kris Kipp
Academic Administrator
Program in Science, Technology, and Society
Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology, and
Science, Technology and Society (HASTS)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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