ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Biosafety as Political Discourse and Diplomatic Symbol: China’s Encounter with International Genetic Engineering Culture in the 1970s

• In Event: Science Diplomacy: Cooperation, Competition and Crisis 3

English Abstract

Genetic engineering was a burgeoning field in the 1970s, and a unique one in terms of its ethical culture. Geneticists are the only scientists ever to voluntarily call for a discipline-wide stop to their own work. Their 1974 moratorium culminated in the 1975 Asilomar Conference on safety concerns related to recombinant DNA research. The conference and the early history of genetic engineering have been narrated as a Western affair. Based on previously unused Chinese and American archival sources, this presentation offers a new timeline of the internationalization of genetic engineering by integrating the viewpoints of Chinese scientists into the development of its ethical debates and safety regulations from 1974 to 1979. During this period, Chinese geneticists found themselves at the intersection of several remarkable scientific and political trends. Chinese science was recovering from the disaster of the Cultural Revolution. As political restrictions on science waned and China increasingly opened to foreign contact through “people-to-people diplomacy,” its scientists encountered genetic engineering as a cutting-edge field and a site of novel ethical debates—but their political experiences inclined them to view these debates with greater scepticism than their Western counterparts. By 1978, genetic engineering took on enormous significance in Sino-American science diplomacy, and for some US officials, the development of biosafety level guidelines became a symbol of China’s integration into a US-aligned world political order as well as a scientific regulatory mechanism. These trends influenced the attitudes that Chinese scientists held and the opportunities available to them as they worked to develop the field in their country.

Authors

• Amanda DeMarco, UC San Diego

• Gao Lu, Tsinghua University