Our title, “Asian Biopoleis: Practice, Place, and Life,” is also the name of a research initiative under way at the National University of Singapore (NUS) since 2010, and is the theme of this issue. 1 The NUS project is likely the first comprehensive social science and humanities research collaboration, housed at a major university and funded by a national granting agency, dedicated to bioscience and biomedicine in Asia. Given Singapore's close identification with this realm of knowledge creation, capital accumulation, clinical and laboratory practice, visual imaging, and storytelling—particularly embodied in the creation of its science cities—the STS clusters of NUS's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Asia Research Institute thought it timely to begin generating insightful scholarship about bioscience/biomedicine from this corner of the world. While some fine articles and book chapters by North American, Australian, and European scholars have been written about biotechnology in Southeast Asia, less has been written from Southeast Asia, or in cooperation with Singapore-based scholars. The present EASTS issue and a 2012 special issue of the journal Science, Technology, and Society (vol. 17, no. 1) 2 are early steps toward bringing the growing scholarship on biomedicine in Southeast Asia (and East Asia through the lens of Southeast Asian institutions and projects) to a regional and global audience.
