Editor’s Note

For EASTS 17.2, we are excited to present the special issue “War and Medicine during the Long Sino–Japanese Wars (1895–1945)” from guest editors Michael Shiyung Liu, James A. Cook, and Tina P. Johnson. As outlined in their introduction, this special issue includes articles from Nicolas Schillinger, Roberto Padilla, and Dan Shao and essays by Wayne Soon and Pi Kuo-Li that offer important historical scholarship on the topics of war, public health, and military medicine analyzed through an STS lens. In addition to our special issue contents—although interesting parallels can certainly be drawn—we have a research note titled “COVID-19 Making ‘Idols’: The Birth of Celebrity Scientists in China.” In this, Siyi Chen et al. investigate the case of four Chinese scientists with distinct public personas, all of whom have sparked an unprecedented storm of publicity since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the early months of 2020. The note explores how these celebrity scientists have played a key role in the governance of pandemic risks by guiding the public’s behavior and offering scientific ways to cope with them. We also include the essay “New Perspectives on Science, Medicine, and Language in Modern South Asia,” in which Andrew Amstutz reviews “Indigenous Knowledges and Colonial Sciences in South Asia,” a special issue of the journal South Asian History and Culture (Volume 13, Issue 1; Routledge, 2022). With the readership of EASTS in mind, this essay offers an excellent review with a special focus on historiographical and methodological issues relevant in the field of STS. Continuing from our previous issue, this essay provides us with a much-needed update of recent scholarship on STS in South Asia. In other news, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that have become available to the public, such as ChatGPT, have been the talk of the town as college campuses scramble to decide whether to ban them or incorporate them into the classroom. As we carefully observe how this phenomenon plays out in the coming months, we are excited to continue the conversation on open AI technologies in our future issues. We are also working toward participating in the 4S Meeting 2023 coming up in November, in Honolulu, Hawaii. As suggested in the meeting’s subtitle of “Sea, Sky, Land, Endangered Ecologies, Solidarities,” we are very much looking forward to reuniting with colleagues against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean and to keeping the discussions going for the benefit of our planet and the environment.