Greetings from the EASTS editorial office, and Happy New Year! As we embark on 2025, we warmly extend our best wishes to all our readers and express our deepest gratitude to the dedicated editors and contributors around the world who make our work possible. This year marks the Year of the Snake, whose ability to shed its skin beautifully symbolizes the spirit of renewal, growth, and steady progress. May its transformative energy, intellectual depth, and mysterious charm inspire a year of thoughtfulness and improvement for us all.
In this first issue of 2025, we begin with three research articles that transport us back a century to events of the mid-1920s. Anin Luo’s “Animal Scientism: Making Biology Experimental in Republican China” examines a transformative period in Chinese biological research. During the Republican era, Chinese biologists transitioned from descriptive methods, such as observation and collection, to experimental approaches such as vivisection, which came to be considered more advanced in the pursuit of modern science. Luo traces the establishment of the Chinese Physiological Society (CPS) in 1926 by Robert Lim, a British-Chinese experimental physiologist. This organization, the first and only Chinese professional society devoted to experimental biology, provided essential resources for research with experimental animals.
