Global Morality and Life Science Practices in Asia: Assemblages of Life [Hardcover]

Empirical studies of life science research and biotechnologies in Asia show how assemblages of life articulate bioethics governance with global moralities and reveal why the global harmonization of bioethical standards is contrived.1. Introduction: From Global Moral Economy to Assemblages of Life 2. Reassembling Populations: Questions of Eugenics in China, India and Japan 3. Biopower and Life Assemblages: Genetic Carrier Testing in India, China and Japan 4. Human Genetic Biobanking and Life Assemblages in Asia: Transnational Moral Economies of Health, Progress and Exploitation 5. Life Assemblages of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research in China and Japan: Bioethical Problematisations and Bioethical Boundary Making 6. Scientists and Publics in East Asian Life Assemblages: Risk, Debate and the Professionalization of Bioethics 7. Life Assemblages and Bionetworking: Developments in Experimental Stem Cell Therapies in India and Japan 8. Reframing the Global Moral Economy of Biotech in Asia: Life Assemblages and Research Objects

Universalistic claims about the politics of life are challenged by this ambitious book on actual life science practices in Asia.

Margaret Sleeboom-Faulkner, sometimes with Asian co-authors, has gathered together case studies on the practice of human population genomics, reproductive medicine, stem cells research in the region. Drawing on ethnographic study of labs and clinics in Japan, China, S. Korea, and India, the book presents each case study as shaped by a particular life assemblage of technological, moral, and political forces in the country. Asian scientists, the book argues, are designing new experiments in the midst of conflicting moral and economic goals of science development, thus forming local conditions of life governance.

This volume is an ideal textbook that expands our understanding of how Asian sites have become global players in configuring the ethics and the politics of the life scl3¦