Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life
Aihwa Ong is Robert H. Lowie Distinguished Chair in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, the author of Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty and Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, and the coeditor of Asian Biotech: Ethics and Communities of Fate, all also published by Duke University Press.
The “Athlete Gene” in China’s Future
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Published:October 2016
This final chapter shifts to South China, where BGI Genomics provides an important contrast to Biopolis in its mix of a commercial global thrust and the use of ethnicity in a national framing of genomic science. BGI has become “a global DNA assembly factory” for having sequenced most of the world’s life-forms. Domestically, bgi deploys official minzu categories that reinforce the national model of Han majority versus non-Han minorities. A Tibetan-Han DNA study looks for the “athlete gene” that may provide insights for developing therapies for Han people who lack this physiological adaptation to living in oxygen-thin highlands. This preemptive...
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