From HPS to STS: Looking Back over My Past Sixty Years

Volume 11, Issue 4

Song Sang-yong is one of the best representatives of the Korean STS community. He has been active on the international scene both in the history of science since the 1970s and in bioethics since the 1990s and has witnessed the birth of STS as an academic movement in the Western world as well as in East Asia. Having inspired a generation of Korean scholars working in STS, Song has been so generous as to serve as an EASTS advisory board member, a post he has been holding since our inception. Reaching eighty years of age in 2017, Song is nevertheless still visible in several of the international projects and networks that are making East Asia such a rich field for STS research. This article is based on his keynote speech at the Twelfth East Asian STS Network Conference in Beijing in November 2016, and its Chinese version is published simultaneously at Science and Culture Review (科学文化评论), a leading journal on the history of science and technology in China. Like Shigeru Nakayama's 2013 intellectual memoir, An Autobiography of a Historian of Science (一科学史家の自伝), it outlines Song's long and fruitful career in STS—teaching, engaging in, and exploring the possibilities of STS for East Asia. EASTS is very grateful to have the input and collaboration of a scholar of Song's caliber and would like to pass his experiences on to coming generations of East Asian STSers.

—EASTS Editorial Office

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