Biotech pilgrims and medical entrepreneurs

"Biotech Pilgrims and Medical Entrepreneurs" follows the efforts of Chinese doctors and their foreign patients to cure what conventional medicine has deemed incurable. Based on 24 months of multi-sited fieldwork at high-tech medical centers in urban China, I argue that the conjunction of market-driven reforms and Internet-based communication technologies has reconfigured the quest for experimental therapies on a global scale. I develop the concept of biotech pilgrimage to explore how faith intertwines with technology and travel as patients and doctors push the boundaries of conventional medical treatment in pursuit of a therapeutic miracle. My ethnographic study highlights the crucial role of the Internet in mediating these new transnational health-seeking practices, exploring how online discussion forums have fostered a new social movement of patients, families, researchers, and doctors who cross national borders to pursue experimental therapies. My dissertation also analyzes how changes in the political economy of health care have encouraged Chinese doctors to experiment with lucrative biomedical interventions for foreign patients, transforming China's urban medical system into a laboratory for entrepreneurial tactics that blur the boundaries between public and private, legal and illegal, ethical and unethical. The pursuit of high-tech therapies by medical entrepreneurs is not just about making money, but also about professional ambitions and national salvation--a cultural phenomenon I frame as technonationalism. "Biotech Pilgrims and Medical Entrepreneurs" synthesizes key concerns in medical anthropology, ethnographic approaches to globalization, and the anthropology of Chinese culture and society. I examine the specific ways in which cultural values, economic pressures, and geopolitical histories engage experimental medicine on the level of lived experience. By foregrounding what is at stake for Chinese doctors and their patients from around the world, I explore how both groups deploy hope in "cutting-edge" medicine as a survival tactic to transcend the danger and uncertainty threatening their lives and their futures.