EASTS has recently undergone a smooth transition in its editorship. After her three-year term as editor in chief came to an end in December 2015, Chia-Ling Wu stepped down, and it is an honor for me to be able to carry on from her leadership, continuing to maintain the academic reputation of this journal and expanding its intellectual influences beyond East Asia proper. We not only recognize the achievements of past editors in chief by listing their names along with current editors; we also keep inviting new people to join us, adding to our capability in driving forward our field of scholarship.
The articles in this issue showcase two of EASTS's specialist fields: social studies of biotechnology, and the history of medicine. Based on twenty years of data from three major Japanese newspapers, Ryuma Shineha's article shows how stem cell research is presented to the Japanese public. By using keyword analysis, he demonstrates the increasing attention paid to stem cell research with the advent of human-induced pluripotent stem cells in 2007. Yet the awarding of a Nobel Prize in 2012 to a Japanese scientist did not, as Shineha observes, generate a long-term media effect, and ethical, legal, and social implications of science are but a peripheral issue for the mass media. Contrasting with Shineha's work on the domestic dynamics between science and the public, the articles by Sofie á Rogvi, Annegrete Juul, and Henriette Langstrup and by Christine Y. L. Luk demonstrate the transnational aspect of biotechnology as it settles in Asia. Rogvi, Juul, and Langstrup reveal the complicated social interactions that have arisen from a diabetes-monitoring software package traveling from Denmark, where it was developed, to users in Indonesia. Luk, meanwhile, shows how we can capture Hong Kong's political and social imaginaries in a moving world by scrutinizing the development there of an anticancer bioproduct, BCT-100. Jia-Chen Fu's research on the production of scientific knowledge as seen in two institutions—the Henry Lester Institute of Medical Research and the Chongqing No. 3 Children's Home—not only transports readers to a Republican China where war and science were conceptually intertwined; it also guides them to the social nexus in which science is produced. As Fu argues, these institutions should be viewed as heterotopic sites, where socially excluded people turn into subjects for scientific investigations.
So, with a farewell essay by Chia-Ling Wu, EASTS's new term begins. I feel deeply grateful for the superb work that Professor Wu and her associate editors, Gregory Clancey, Michael M. J. Fischer, Sungook Hong, Shang-jen Li, and Togo Tsukahara (in alphabetical order), have done, and for all the editors who contribute their time, energy, and expertise to EASTS.
