Rethinking “Science”: Esophageal Cancer Research and Prevention in China since 1958

• In Event: Science from Elsewhere: Thinking from Where we Think - II

Abstract

This paper is a case study of the previously overlooked history of cancer prevention and research in Linxian, a poverty-stricken county in China from the 1950s on. At the center lies the question: how did a "less-developed country" tackle the cancer problem, which is still one of the most daunting medical challenges in the world? By examining Chinese research papers published in the 1960s on esophageal cancer and the transnational nutrition intervention trials conducted by both Chinese and American researchers between 1982 and 1998, this paper argues that the Chinese state used similar strategies to eradicate cancer as they did previously to wipe out other major contagious diseases such as schistosomiasis. However, since the cause of cancer was not as clear as other diseases, the anti-cancer campaign in China was as much as about mass movement that exhorts peasants to participate in disease prevention as it was about improvising both treatment and scientific research. In doing so this paper attempts to rethink about the difference between science in its normative sense, and grassroots science which is seen as the defining feature of science in Maoist China (1949-1976). Apart from that, the Chinese case also sheds lights on the limits of the role of high-tech biomedicine in the cancer epidemic. While genetic testing and precision medicine offer new hopes for cancer patients, they also deepen the issue of inequality. The anti-cancer campaign in both Maoist and post-Maoist China offers us a different way to think about and tackle the cancer issue.

Author

• Danping Wang, Columbia University