In 2015, Jiang became a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her recent publications include "Retouching the Past with Living Things: Indigenous Species, Tradition, and Biological Research in Republican China, 1918-1937," Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 46, no. 2 (April 2016): 154–206, and (with Hallam Stevens) "Chinese Biotech versus International Ethics? Accounting for the China–America CRISPR Ethical Divide," BioSocieties 10 (December 2015): 483-488.
Lijing Jiang
Ph.D. CandidateHistory and Philosophy of ScienceArizona State University
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Dissertation Research Fellow
Degeneration in Miniature: Cell Death and Aging Research in the Twentieth Century
Abstract: Once perceived as unimportant occurrence in living organisms, cell degeneration has been reconfigured as an important biological phenomenon in development, aging, health, and diseases since the mid-twentieth century. Studies of cell death and aging have gone through stages of morphological description, functional interpretation, speculation about mechanism, and eventual expanded into an influential and multivalent research field in the era of molecular biology in the 1990s. This project examines and compares Viktor Hamburger’s, Leonard Hayflick’s, Robin Holliday’s, and H. Robert Horvitz’s studies to trace the trajectory of modern cell degeneration research. These cases capture representative research styles, experimental materials, and socio-cultural priorities of biological science in different decades of the twentieth century. Together, they illuminate how scientific, material, and historical contexts conditioned our current knowledge and research programs about cell degeneration. Such knowledge, in turn, has begun to permeate into how we conceive life, death and disease. Read Lijing's report on her PACHS-sponsored research here.
Updates
Lijing Jiang
Lijing Jiang
Jiang has been appointed Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, starting in December 2014. Her recent publications include "IVF the Chinese Way: Zhang Lizhu and Post-Mao Human in vitro Fertilization Research," in East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal (forthcoming); "Causes of Aging Are Likely to be Many: Robin Holliday and Changing Molecular Approaches to Cell Aging, 1963-1988," in the Journal of the History of Biology; and "Viktor Hamburger," in the Encyclopedia of Life Sciences.
Lijing Jiang
just finished her dissertation in August, "Degeneration in Miniature: History of Cell Death and Aging Research in the Twentieth Century". She is currently at Princeton University as a D. Kim Postdoctoral Fellow, co-affiliated with the East Asian Studies Department and History of Science Program.