Negotiating Evidence and Efficacy in Experimental Medicine

Abstract

This chapter examines how urban Chinese neurosurgeons have leveraged fetal cell therapies in order to survive and thrive in a rapidly changing healthcare system. Their experimental practices raise key questions about the ethics and epistemology of clinical experimentation at the “cutting edge” of biomedical practice in contemporary China. It demonstrates how the pursuit of science and technology is not just a strategy for individual triumph but a broader cultural mandate for national salvation, which is described as “technonationalism.” While changes in the financing and organization of healthcare sparked by China's transition to market socialism over the past few decades have enabled and encouraged entrepreneurial physicians to develop advanced therapeutic interventions, these high-tech desires must be situated in a broader Chinese program of scientific and technological modernization. The chapter also takes a closer look at the semiotics by which practitioners and patients recognize medical authenticity and charlatanism.