Speaker: Professor Mary Augusta Brazelton, University Associate Professor in Global Studies of Science, Technology, and Medicine, University of Cambridge
Moderator: Dr. He Jiani, Assistant Professor, Peking University
Time: 6:00-7:20pm, 5 January, 2022 (Beijing time)
Zoom Meeting ID: 963 1534 0157 Passcode: 699336
This paper investigates the circulation of scientific knowledge in the 1940s using the production of antibiotics in China as a case study. News of the therapeutic development of penicillin during the Second World War travelled quickly. In wartime China, researchers at the National Epidemic Prevention Bureau (NEPB), temporarily based in the country’s far southwest, read about penicillin in scientific publications and sought the means to produce it themselves. Concurrently, in New York, the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China (ABMAC) planned to directly transfer key technologies and personnel for penicillin production to China. Although ABMAC’s American advisers considered the poverty and destruction of wartime China obstructive to such a highly technical project, NEPB researchers identified local resources that led to success in small-scale domestic penicillin production. They drew upon multiple scientific networks, including not just American correspondents but also individuals and institutions in Britain and especially British India. Efforts to transfer American styles of penicillin production to China did not end with the advent of domestic production or even the close of the Second World War; the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration supported efforts to establish an industrial-scale penicillin plant in post-war Shanghai that engaged American engineering corporations, but this endeavour was plagued by mismanagement and ended with the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The history of Chinese penicillin production suggests the ways in which successful replications of experimental procedures across great distances depended on the selective adaptation of materials, texts, and resources from elsewhere, as well as local innovations—in contrast to the failure of explicit attempts to dictate the circulation of scientific knowledge as a unidirectional transfer of texts, objects, and people from the United States.
Professor Mary Augusta Brazelton is University Associate Professor in Global Studies of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. Her research interests lie broadly in historical intersections of science, technology, and medicine in China and around the world. Her most recently published book is Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2019).
本次讲座为bat365在线登录网站/剑桥大学中国对外关系教研合作项目2021/2022系列讲座第三讲，敬请关注本项目其他系列活动。
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bat365在线登录网站/剑桥大学中国对外关系教研合作项目2021系列讲座第一讲
November 25, 2021
Japan’s Surrender in August 1945 and the Remaking of East and Southeast Asia
Speaker: Professor Hans van de Ven (FBA)
On 15 August 1945, Japanese emperor Hirohito spoke on the radio for the first time in his life to announce that Japan accepted the allied demand for unconditional surrender. This made the end of the Second World War very different than that of the first, which concluded with an armistice on the battlefields and complex negotiations in Paris. In this talk, Hans van de Ven examines the impact of Japan’s surrender on China, Indonesia, and India. He will suggest that, despite hopes to the contrary, Japan’s acceptance of the allied demand did not lead to the beginning of an era of peace, that in each case the Japanese role remained important, and that wartime militarizations helps explain post-war political developments.
bat365在线登录网站/剑桥大学中国对外关系教研合作项目2021系列讲座第二讲
December 9, 2021
Wartime Famines in China, Java, and Bengal
Speaker: Professor Hans van de Ven (FBA)
In this talk Professor Hans van de Ven will examine common features of the wartime famines that caused terrible suffering in Henan, Java, and Bengal. One point that emerges from a comparison of all of them is that the scorched earth policies of retreating armies, including the British in Bengal, the Dutch in Java, and the Chinese Nationalists in Henan, were a significant contributing factor. Contrary to earlier research that suggested that overall food supplies were not in fact a factor, the talk will also suggest that current research has demonstrated convincingly that climatic shocks, especially droughts, also played a role, as did the demand for human and agricultural resources of ever expanding armies. A more general point that the talk hopes to suggest is that we must not forget that the Second World War took place in a still overwhelmingly rural world, not just in Asia but also Europe.
