While Aihwa Ong's Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life addresses a recent subject—the influx of investment in the life sciences in East and Southeast Asia—and frames its questions in the medical anthropology of risk and uncertainty, the work also holds a tacit investment in questions of empire, particularly as the city-state of Singapore seeks to leverage its strengths through the pursuit of modern techno-science. A companion and follow-up work to a previous edited volume undertaken with Nancy Chen, Asian Biotech, 1Fungible Life focuses nominally on a single site, Singapore, and the constructed story of origins underlying its biosciences park, Biopolis (2003–present). Situating the island nation with respect to scientific networks ranged across a collective of sites, including San Francisco, San Diego, and Cambridge, Fungible Life also references and contrasts with more immediate neighbors, such as Kyoto and Shenzhen. If Singapore has skillfully positioned itself as an “Asian” alternative to its metropolitan counterparts, Ong dissects the rhetoric underlying this constructed dichotomy, particularly the tropes of ethnicity and race frequently used to link to existing categories, and sometimes mapped onto emerging sets of biological data, as with the case of the minzhu (ethnic or minority groups) in China. Ultimately a work concerned with the geographical repositioning and increasing mobility of scientific elites, and the corresponding sites associated with knowledge production, Fungible Life nonetheless pauses at moments to consider whether imperial structures—whether of British, Chinese, or Japanese origin—continue to affect these more recent concerns.
With a number of these issues informing her prior work, here referring not only to Asian Biotech, but also to the edited volume Global Assemblages, 2 Ong seeks to recast problems of technology and life in theoretical terms, crafting a new vocabulary and situating herself within a broader literature of biological and medical anthropology. In spatial terms, this means paying a great deal of attention to the non-West, and even as Singapore remains the central and nominal focus of the work, there are numerous references to related sites (India, Japan) and scholars within Ong's network (Lawrence Cohen, Andrew Lakoff, Margaret Lock, and Kaushik Sunder Rajan), indicating an interest in breaking down older categories such as center-periphery or periphery-metropole. In selecting a site such as Singapore, Ong has therefore consciously chosen a locale that has decided to bet big—both literally and metaphorically, as Ong informs us of the state's simultaneous aim to invest in casino infrastructure through the Marina Bay Sands Project—on the life sciences, here combining existing strengths in higher education (National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University) with a series of emerging partnerships, including relationships with Johns Hopkins, Duke University Medical School, and MIT.
In laying out this ambitious project with three thematic clusters, Ong's analytic functions at its sharpest when it interrogates the broader Sino-sphere world of the Malay peninsula and Singapore, especially the multiple ways in which some of the major actors behind Biopolis, JTC (Jurong Town Corporation) and Philip Yeo, have sought to capitalize upon tropes of “Asia” and “Asian-ness.” With the SARS outbreak of 2003 extending beyond southeastern China to reach Southeast Asia, Singapore was able to capitalize by creating a “success” narrative of its own; in fact, a statue of the SARS genome features prominently in the Biopolis Park, where visitors can “pass through” the structure, thereby overcoming the disease. Along similar lines, Biopolis has built this message into its core thematics, claiming that its labs and facilities will provide greater access to “Asian” diseases such as dengue and malaria, holding a material impact for the lives of Singaporeans and their neighbors. Moreover, the genetic diversity of the region offers great promise as well, a message designed to appeal to international partners such as HUGO (Human Genome Organization), here linked with the figure of Edison Liu, a bioscientist and one of the senior heads among the various “foreign talents” recruited to Singapore with offers of funding and access to stem cell lines for research.
In setting up these lines of inquiry, especially in the first section, “Risks,” Ong takes care to balance the diverse claims contained within the Biopolis narrative of origins, pointing out that many of these tropes have a backstory. The local schematic for ethnic classification, for example, collectively known as “CMIO” (Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other), derives from the British colonial experience, and continues to inform Singapore's uneasy blend of politics and ethnic-based authoritarianism. At the same time, Ong observes that the sorts of “uncertainties” (section two) associated with the park and its considerable ambitions may be viewed as productive, rather than as problematic. A significant motivating factor links these goals to proximity and potential access to China, with Singapore's combination of domestic scientists, foreign-recruited (senior) personnel, and a slate of regulatory and diagnostic tools combining to form a powerful appeal, especially for conducting clinical trials and generating new forms of drug discovery. Here, although not always stated explicitly, Singapore is juxtaposed with biopark sites in India and in China, projects possessing similar aims but lacking Singapore's considerable reputation for regulatory efficiency.
If its regulatory culture offers one potential benefit to Singapore's prospective clients, another key issue lies in the management of accumulated biological data, a concern not only for individuals, but also framed here in terms of the politics of indigenous groups and their relations to external forces, whether in terms of the state or in terms of privacy and corporate interests. In raising these issues, Ong overlaps with recent work in the history of biology, especially Joanna Radin's Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood and Radin's edited volume with Emma Kowal, Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World.3 These two works provide a much-needed perspective on the history of bio-banking in the international context, an area where Singapore often tries to legitimate itself against a background of China and India, without necessarily addressing its own vexed domestic politics. In fact, a number of Singapore's recent health campaigns challenge any claim to transparency and expertise, whether we refer to the policy of sterilization targeting select groups of women or the eugenics message implicit to the “graduate mothers” schemes of the 1980s, offering incentives to Singaporean Chinese women willing to reproduce under specific conditions. Ong's focus remains on the recent, but her questions touch upon the deep fissures within the region, especially the ethnic-based politics informing the relationship between Singapore and Malaysia.
Ambitious in scope and thorough in its coverage, Fungible Life will be of interest to Southeast Asia scholars, along with those coming from the fields of East Asian studies and science, technology, and society. The Singapore focus provides a close look at a particular site, and again, China and its life science ambitions lurk in the background; in many respects, this work pursues the constitution and make-up of metropolitan science networks as a form of contrast to its stated subject matter. If the Singapore narrative of biosciences seeks to build upon previous efforts framed in economic terms, Ong remains careful to challenge and probe the rhetoric and evidence on display, recognizing that a great deal of material work informs any effort to establish networks of exchange. If Singapore's claims to transparency hold great appeal, they lack a firm foundation and are frequently based in metaphor rather than materiality. Although the possibility of “fungible life” remains, it stands as elusive, subject to increasing scrutiny.
