This essay follows animals from the animal house through the laboratory to their representation as abstracted knowledge circulating the world to trace the emergence of experimental biology in Republican China. Experimental biology was promoted and institutionalized by the Chinese Physiological Society, which British-Chinese experimental physiologist Robert Lim established in 1926, at a time when descriptive taxonomy and morphology were dominant. Proponents argued that experimental research on live animals was more advanced than the collection and observation of specimens, and that experimentation, rather than description, now undergirded international science. In championing experimentalism, they were not only trying to shift the focus of Chinese biology from description to experiment, but also revising the scientism by then entrenched in Republican China. They put forth a scientism of experiment: cultivating experimental biology would help China catch up more quickly to imperial powers. Animals, as the material basis for experimental biology, came to signify the science that they produced; the Buddhist-aligned Chinese Animal Protection Society, established in 1932, chose not to protest animal experimentation in part due to the association between animals and modern experimentalism. In Republican China, animals were thus material and cultural objects that made and embodied a new scientism of experiment.
Keywords:
The Peking Union Medical College 北京協和醫學院 (PUMC) sat in the heart of Republican Peking. Amid the hustle and bustle of the city, the most prominent research institution in the country—the “Johns Hopkins of China” established and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1906—took up one block. The compound consisted of a teaching hospital, dormitories for researchers and staff, and laboratories dedicated to clinical medicine, pharmacology, and pathology, as well as physiology. And mixed in with the sound of gossiping patients, shouting physicians, and rumbling ambulance trucks was the incessant barking of dogs. For by 1934, the College contained at least three animal houses, teeming not just with dogs, but also cats, rats, mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, and other experimental animals—even the occasional exotic creature, including, once, a camel.
