The 2025 Nicholas C. Mullins Prize Committee is pleased to announce that this year’s prize is awarded to Anin Luo for the article “Animal Scientism: Making Biology Experimental in Republican China” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 19(1): 8–36 (2024).
This fascinating article documents the role of non-human animals in the making of experimental biology in Republican China. It draws on an original archive based at the Peking Union Medical College—home to the first Chinese organization dedicated to experimental biology—to craft a sophisticated story of the rise of animal experimentalism as an anti-Imperial and modernizing strategy during the early twentieth century. Luo’s account decenters the centrality of the West in defining the terms of contemporary lab life. It expertly uses animals as an interscalar vehicle through which to articulate the role of experimental biology in helping the Chinese nation to express and pursue anti-Imperialist desire. As she writes, “From the animal house through the laboratory to journal articles and international conference presentations, and even to the cultural discourse of elites, animals held the promise of a better future for China” (Luo 2024, 24–25). Moreover, Luo’s rigorous analysis impressively weaves in the role of religion in affirming this regime, providing an account of how Buddhist principles were (counterintuitively) used to justify animal vivisection. In doing so, the article also contributes to multispecies studies, complicating the terrain of ethical life with animals.
I am honored to receive the Nicholas C. Mullins Award. I am grateful for the many people who have supported me in the writing of “Animal Scientism,” especially Mary Brazelton, Angela Creager, and the reviewers and editors at EASTS, as well as staff at the Rockefeller Archive Center. I am also indebted to the British Society for the History of Science, which provided generous research funding. And thank you to 4S for its support for graduate student research.
Anin Luo is a PhD Candidate in the History of Science Program at Princeton University. Her research seeks to historicize the relationship between politics and understandings of human life. She has explored this through the category of “the animal” in the contexts of film, the life sciences, and law, and she is currently working on a dissertation on immunity. Treating living beings’ vulnerability to the environment as both a biological and political problem, it provides a history of how liberal, socialist, and postcolonial scientists, physicians, politicians, legal thinkers, and public health officials used knowledge and practices around immunology to contest claims to health and welfare at international forums.
The 2025 Mullins Prize Committee: Thao Phan (Chair), Alex Zahara, and Upali Battacharya.