On ‘Asian’ Distinctiveness and Race as a Variable: The Case of Ophthalmic Epidemiology in Singapore

The notion that Singapore’s multi-ethnic population provides a unique and quintessentially ‘Asian’ asset for its biomedical sciences initiative has been part of the discourse in local and international media coverage of that sector. It has also been highlighted by scholars as a feature of Singapore’s political economy. This article discusses how ‘racial/ethnic difference’ was initially central but then became peripheral to one high-profile research programme: the Singapore Epidemiology of Eye Disease (SEED) Study Programme. The case study is offered as an example of the flexible deployment and situational enactment of racial/ethnic difference in biomedical science, by demonstrating how it gets entangled with and disentangled from the creation of scientific capital and legitimacy, as well as complicates the notion of ‘Asian’ science