Negotiating Evidence and Efficacy in Experimental Medicine

Abstract

The transition from laboratory bench to hospital bed is happening at an accelerated pace in contemporary China, with increasing numbers of new treatments being tested on patients. As the former emphasis on state-funded preventive care has yielded to a market-driven pursuit of high-tech interventions and subsequent efforts to redress growing health inequalities, ambitious Chinese clinicians and their increasingly globalized clientele have latched onto biomedical innovation as their ticket to personal success. This chapter examines how how clinicians and patients have interpreted signs of evidence, negotiated standards of proof, and resolved questions of efficacy in the transnational realm of fetal cell therapies. I demonstrate how new modes of validation are emerging as viable alternatives to the hegemonic discourse of randomized controlled trials that has dominated the quest for “evidence” in experimental medicine.