Provincializing (Western) Model Organisms through the East Asian Fish
Lijing Jiang, Johns Hopkins University
A model organism has been understood as consisting of standardized colonies of biological species that are supposed to represent other species including humans in the laboratory and are supposed to work at any laboratory in the same manner. In the twentieth century, during which such a conception consolidated, prevalent model organisms portrayed by scholars were usually used as genetic tools in service of fundamental or biomedical research. Some key assumptions of the model organism, such as its laboratory universalism, genetic essentialness, and bifurcating roles in fundamental and biomedical research, may have partially resulted from a limited scope of historical inquiries regarding the topic restricted to the relative few examples in the Western World. What can we learn if we take experimental organisms emerged elsewhere seriously and try to understand how they have functioned and evolved with alternative contexts? What can a comparative study between model organisms East and West teach us about previously hidden features of the Western models?
In this chapter, I critically examine the narratives, technologies, phenomena of interest, and goals in the development of the zebrafish model at George Streisinger’s Laboratory at University of Oregon from the late 1960s to the early 1980s by comparing them with relevant observations I gained while researching about how medaka (the Japanese rice fish) and goldfish functioned as experimental organisms in Japan and China. These juxtapositions reveal some previously hidden precedence, inspiration, and resource from East Asia for the foundation of Streisinger’s zebrafish research and expose some of the very local features of late-century Western model organisms that have been often taken as universal. Further, I suggest that deeper understanding of history of modern science in non-Western world, in addition to all other merits, is essential for scholars to fully and critically understand the resources, styles, and limitations of modern science within the Western world.