To honor the pioneering contributions by Dr. Tsungming Tu in the fields of science and medicine, the Taiwanese Ministry of Science and Technology created the Tsungming Tu Award as the “highest academic honor granted to foreigners for research in Taiwan.” Nevertheless, a pair of salient enigmas exist concerning his scientific career: Why did Dr. Tsungming Tu, a widely acclaimed representative of medical modernity in Taiwan, provide consistent support to research in traditional East Asian medicine, especially its materia medica? Conversely, why was Dr. Tu’s research program criticized as backward-looking and non-scientific throughout his lifetime?

       The present project intends to investigate the research program that Dr. Tu proposed in late 1920s, situating it in a multi-layered transnational context that involved multiple countries (Taiwan, Japan, China, Germany, and United States) and multiple disciplines (chemistry, pharmacology, pharmacognosy, and the emerging field of experimental therapeutics). Because of his good fortune to grow up with one of the most renowned practitioners of traditional medicine in colonial Taiwan, Dr. Tu had first-hand experience with observing the therapeutic efficacy of traditional materia medica as well as with the frustrating difficulty of validating these substances with established methodology of scientific research. From the viewpoint of young Dr. Tu, the challenge was to go beyond established scientific approaches to develop a new program that met his objective of materializing the therapeutic value of traditional East Asian materia medica. The present project aims to reconstruct the historical process through which Dr. Tu drew on a number of newly developed scientific disciplines to assemble a highly innovative, and therefore controversial, research program, including the idea of a research-centered hospital of Kampo (Japanese-Chinese) medicine. By way of situating Dr. Tu’s research program in multiple international contexts of science, this project will show the concrete ways that he intended to create multiple methodological breakthroughs for world scientific community in conducting research on traditional East Asian medicine.