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The prologue opens with the popular image of personal genetics in California as a contrast to the collective approach to genomic science in Singapore. It argues that a study of contemporary medical science in Asia should move beyond the binary West–Asia framework in medical anthropology. The prologue situates genomic science in debates on racialized medicine in the United States. It argues that genomic science propelled the shift from race as a fixed biological reality to an ethnicity as inclusionary heuristic for minority groups. Singapore uses the National Institutes of Health ethnic heuristic to include majority populations in Asia in genomic databases. The author argues that the globalization of bioscience is better studied through the lens of a “global assemblage” that captures the situated entanglement of cosmopolitan science with Asian politics and ethics. Biopolis is a crystallization of such global-local interactions, with mainly American scientific experiments seeking access to Asian bodies and data, and Singaporean concerns about building biomedical expertise, economy, and biosecurity in the region. The book is positioned in “an anthropology of the future.” It argues for the relevance of the ethnographic method for investigating contemporary practices that transform cultural notions of the anthropos, including technological interventions into ways of being human in the twenty-first century. Included is a discussion of fieldwork and informants.

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