Program in the History of Science and Medicine Presents: "The Antibiotic Enterprise: Penicillin Production in China and Transnational Circulations of Biomedical Knowledge, 1940-49"

The Antibiotic Enterprise: Penicillin Production in China and Transnational Circulations of Biomedical Knowledge, 1940-49

Mary Brazelton, Cambridge University

Mary Brazelton will discuss her investigation into the circulation of scientific knowledge in the 1940s using the production of antibiotics in China as a case study. News of the therapeutic development of penicillin during the Second World War traveled quickly. In wartime China, researchers at the National Epidemic Prevention Bureau (NEPB), temporarily based in the country’s far southwest, read about penicillin in scientific publications and sought the means to produce it themselves. Concurrently, in New York, the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China (ABMAC) planned to directly transfer key technologies and personnel for penicillin production to China. Although ABMAC’s American advisers considered the poverty and destruction of wartime China obstructive to such a highly technical project, NEPB researchers identified local resources that led to success in small-scale domestic penicillin production. They drew upon multiple scientific networks, including not just American correspondents but also individuals and institutions in Britain and especially British India. Efforts to transfer American styles of penicillin production to China did not end with the advent of domestic production or even the close of the Second World War; the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration supported efforts to establish an industrial-scale penicillin plant in postwar Shanghai that engaged American engineering corporations, but this endeavor was plagued by mismanagement and ended with the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. The history of Chinese penicillin production suggests the ways in which successful replications of experimental procedures across great distances depended on the selective adaptation of materials, texts, and resources from elsewhere, as well as local innovations—in contrast to the failure of explicit attempts to dictate the circulation of scientific knowledge as a unidirectional transfer of texts, objects, and people from the United States.

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