Traditionality and Lab Work: Anti-Cancer Drug Research in Mao’s China

This article opens a window on anti-cancer drug research using “traditional Chinese medicine” (TCM) in Mao-period China. Drawing on a database of over 120 scientific journal articles from that period, it discusses how physician-researchers mined Chinese materia medica for cancer cures in the context of political and practical imperatives. Some results were productive, though the interpretive possibilities of assigning credit to traditional/Chinese or Western/modern medicine in any particular instance remained broad. The article examines how extending or withholding traditionality to substances that made a seeming transition from that realm to modern clinical use was negotiated in different instances. It also locates Chinese pharmaceutical research, for the first time, in the larger context of global bioprospecting for anti-cancer drugs, which was characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s.