Date: Friday 22 February 2019
Time: 7:00pm
Venue: Hong Kong Museum of History, Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
In a world where technologies and risks move faster than laws can keep pace, thousands of people from more than eighty countries have journeyed to China to undergo fetal and stem cell transplantation. HKU medical anthropologist Priscilla Song tells the story of these global quests to cure the incurable, exploring why and how American and European patients suffering from neurodegenerative conditions have entrusted their lives to neurosurgeons in China. Bringing together a decade of anthropological research in hospital wards, laboratories, and online patient discussion forums, Song’s award-winning book Biomedical Odysseys offers a powerful account of the promise and perils of the new biology. Song humanizes stem cell therapies and illustrates how poignant journeys for cures become entangled in China’s rapidly changing healthcare landscape.
Dr. Priscilla Song is Assistant Professor in the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. Trained as an anthropologist at Harvard University, her research examines the culture and ethics of transnational biomedical technologies in urban China. Her book Biomedical Odysseys: Fetal Cell Experiments from Cyberspace to China (Princeton University Press 2017) received the 2018 Francis Hsu Book Prize from the Society for East Asian Anthropology.