Recent literature on the history of medicine in colonial Korea has revealed that Japanese medical scientists studied Korean bodies to expose racial differences between the Japanese and Koreans and justify Japanese colonial rule. Previous scholars, however, have focused mainly on finding a connection between colonial medical research and eugenics. This article attempts to consider things as yet underinvestigated, in particular, the way in which medical research on Koreans emerged and was intertwined with Japanese colonialism in other ways, separate from contemporary eugenics projects. The article examines the emergence and development of what we now considered as “racial sciences”—physical anthropology, serological anthropology, and human genetics—with regard to the biological characteristics of Koreans. In doing so, it argues that biological speculations on Koreans originated as a subdiscipline of Japanese origin studies and resonated with a newly emerging type of colonial racism in colonial Korea—inclusionary racism. The article also presents the colonial scientific enterprise’s conclusion that Koreans were biologically heterogeneous, contradicting colonial Korean intellectuals’ assertion about Korean ethnic homogeneity. The use of Korean ethnic homogeneity as an ideological basis for nation building by two Korean governments meant that postcolonial Korean scientists had to seek a way to reconcile the colonial era’s “scientific conclusion” (biological heterogeneity) with the postcolonial era’s “politically approved” conceptualization (biological homogeneity). Therefore, regardless of whether it was trying to refute, appropriate, or revitalize the colonial legacy, biological research on Koreans in the postcolonial period was carried out under the framework that had been constructed by colonial racial sciences.
ArgumentAfter World War II, blood groups became a symbol of anti-racial science. This paper aims to shed new light on the post-WWII history of blood groups and race, illuminating the postcolonial revitalization of racial serology in South Korea. In the prewar period, Japanese serologists developed a serological anthropology of Koreans in tandem with Japanese colonialism. The pioneering Korean hematologist Yi Samyŏl , inspired by decolonization movements during the 1960s, excavated and appropriated colonial serological anthropology to prove Koreans as biologically independent from the Japanese. However, his racial serology of Koreans shared colonial racism with Japanese anthropology, despite his anti-colonial nationalism.
While gene doping and other technological means of sport enhancement have become a topic of ethical debate, a major outcome from genomic research in sports is often linked to the regulation of doping. In particular, researchers within the field of anti-doping science, a regulatory science that aims to develop scientific solutions for regulating doped athletes, have conducted genomic research on anabolic-androgenic steroids. Genomic knowledge on anabolic-androgenic steroids, a knowledge base that has been produced to improve doping regulation, has caused the ‘geneticization’ of cultural objects such as ethnic identities and dietary habits. Through examining how anti-doping genomic knowledge and its media representation unnecessarily reify cultural objects in terms of genomics, I argue that Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) research programs in human enhancement should include the social impacts of anti-doping science in their discussions. Furthermore, this article will propose that ELSI scholars begin their academic analysis on anti-doping science by engaging with the recent ELSI scholarship on genomics and race and consider the regulatory and political natures of anti-doping research.
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