IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB001450053

Convergent Lines of Descent: Symptoms, Patterns, Constellations, and the Emergent Interface of Systems Biology and Chinese Medicine (2014)

Scheid, Volker (Author)

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Volume: 8, no. 1
Issue: 1
Pages: 107-139

DOI: 10.1215/18752160-2407180

Outside Links

PubMed

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, a network composed of politicians, regulators, bioscientists, clinical researchers, and Chinese medicine specialists has emerged that seeks to bridge an imagined gulf between the modern West and ancient China in order to create a new type of personalized medicine. The central building block of this bridge is the Chinese medical concept of zheng / , variously translated into English as syndrome, pattern, or type. My paper places side by side two different genealogies of how zheng assumed this central role. The first genealogy examines the process by means of which zheng came to be considered as something shared by both ancient China and cutting-edge biological science and, by extension, how it manages to hold together the entire institutional, political, and economic framework into which this bridge is embedded and which it co-creates. The second genealogy shows zheng to be central to a much older series of redefinitions of Chinese medicine and Chinese medical practice that extend from the eleventh century to the present. Read together, these two genealogies---neither of which should be seen as exhaustive---raise three important issues that are further discussed in the conclusion of the paper. First, I explore how the concept of zheng has come to tie a medical tradition derided by its adversaries for being a pseudoscience to one of the most cutting-edge fields of bioscience research. I ask what is at stake in this synthesis, for whom, and why, and how it transforms Chinese medicine and/or systems biology along the way. Second, I am interested in finding out how and why the very same concept can be at the heart of two apparently agonistic visions of Chinese medicine's future as it is popularly imagined in China today. Finally, I insist that the medical humanities need to become actively involved in the construction of emergent articulations such as the ones I am exploring. Merely writing a history of the present will not be productive unless its critique can somehow be articulated into the very processes of emergence that historians or anthropologists seek to examine.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001450053/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Hua-Yu Li; (2010)
China Learns from the Soviet Union, 1949–Present (/isis/citation/CBB774612023/)

Article Harrison, Henrietta; (2012)
Rethinking Missionaries and Medicine in China: The Miracles of Assunta Pallotta, 1905--2005 (/isis/citation/CBB001202139/)

Article Wilcox, Hui Niu; Kong, Panyia; (2014)
How to Eat Right in America: Power, Knowledge, and the Science of Hmong American Food and Health (/isis/citation/CBB001320893/)

Book Zhan, Mei; (2009)
Other-Worldly: Making Chinese Medicine through Transnational Frames (/isis/citation/CBB001231968/)

Book Gordon Mathews; Yang, Yang; Linessa Dan Lin; (2017)
The World in Guangzhou: Africans and other foreigners in south China's global marketplace (/isis/citation/CBB122420294/)

Article Frédéric Keck; (2020)
Asian Tigers and the Chinese Dragon: Competition and Collaboration Between Sentinels of Pandemics from Sars to COVID-19 (/isis/citation/CBB928442723/)

Article Guo, Sun-Wei; (2013)
China's “Gene War of the Century” and Its Aftermath: The Contest Goes On (/isis/citation/CBB001420872/)

Article Zhaoyuan Wan; (2018)
Newton in China: Translating the Principia into Chinese (c. 1855–2015) (/isis/citation/CBB579089803/)

Thesis Yawen Zou; (2016)
Using A Computational Approach to Study the History of Systems Biology: From Systems to Biology, 1992-2013 (/isis/citation/CBB723000522/)

Book Alban Frei; (2018)
Sichtbare Netzwerke: Forschungspolitik und Life-Sciences zwischen 1990 und 2016 in der Schweiz. Eine Fallstudie zu SystemsX.ch (/isis/citation/CBB130161050/)

Chapter Roberto Serra; (2015)
Proprietà generiche nei sistemi complessi (/isis/citation/CBB320748884/)

Book Michel Morange; (2020)
The Black Box of Biology: A History of the Molecular Revolution (/isis/citation/CBB035364586/)

Article Michael Fry; (2018)
Predictive Hypotheses Are Ineffectual in Resolving Complex Biochemical Systems (/isis/citation/CBB002665433/)

Article Bechtel, William; (2010)
The Cell: Locus or Object of Inquiry? (/isis/citation/CBB001023957/)

Article Janina Wellmann; (2018)
Model and Movement: Studying Cell Movement in Early Morphogenesis, 1900 to the Present (/isis/citation/CBB034220227/)

Article Fridolin Gross; Nina Kranke; Robert Meunier; (2019)
Pluralization Through Epistemic Competition: Scientific Change in Times of Data-Intensive Biology (/isis/citation/CBB374064986/)

Article Michael Fry; (2020)
Ontologically Simple Theories Do Not Indicate the True Nature of Complex Biological Systems: Three Test Cases (/isis/citation/CBB515852529/)

Article Kathleen M. Giacomini; Lauffenburger, Douglas A.; (Fall 2013)
Systems Biology and Systems Pharmacology (/isis/citation/CBB578530718/)

Book Sara Green; (2016)
Philosophy of Systems Biology: Perspectives from Scientists and Philosophers (/isis/citation/CBB545077792/)

Article Miles MacLeod; Nancy J. Nersessian; (2018)
Modeling Complexity: Cognitive Constraints and Computational Model-Building in Integrative Systems Biology (/isis/citation/CBB935002178/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}