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This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book is an ethnographic account of biomedical odysseys of people who have entrusted their bodies to Chinese neurosurgeons operating at the cutting edge of experimental medicine. The book follows these patients and clinicians from online discussion forums to Chinese hospital wards in order to understand the hopes, frustrations, and possibilities that experimental therapies offer those living with conditions deemed incurable. In the chapters that follow, the author develops an anthropology of transnational regenerative medicine that documents how hope is produced and troubled both online and through physical encounters with experimental therapies transpiring on the fringes of biomedicine.

This epilogue reflects on the ways in which the biomedical odysseys documented in the book open up important questions about the contours of experimentality and the proliferating hopes generated by transnational regenerative medicine. It returns to the metaphor of “cutting edge” in order to illuminate how the experiences of Chinese neurosurgeons and their foreign patients deepen our understanding of the multiple and material ways in which hope transforms technology, travel, and the political economies of health care and medical research in a digitally mediated world. Many of the fetal cell pioneers mentioned in the preceding chapters died during the decade that the author spent researching and writing this book. Their poignant yet grueling encounters with the experimental demand our acknowledgment of the complex ways in which hope endures online and through bodily engagements on the cutting edge of regenerative medicine.

As Dr. Huang and the New Century staff members were busy devising new methods to document the effects of their experimental human olfactory ensheathing glial cell transplantation surgery, patients and their families also developed their own ways of assessing whether the experimental procedure worked. This chapter focuses on how fetal cell recipients and their families have engaged questions of efficacy in the transnational realm of experimental medicine. Prospective transplantation candidates carefully parsed online reports of others' surgical experiences and analyzed the credibility of Chinese neurosurgeons' claims, while postoperative patients monitored their bodies for signs of difference and parsed these changes online. It is argued that the digitally mediated forms of knowledge they have produced offer a poignant challenge to what counts as expertise and data in the quest for “evidence” in experimental medicine.

This chapter explores how the embodied dynamics of illness and chronicity shape online modes of health-seeking by comparing the experiences of people living with spinal cord injuries (SCIs) to those of people suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). As diverse biological conditions become increasingly mediated by digital modes of representation, these emergent forms of “biomediation” catalyze new hopes and possibilities for those seeking to challenge orthodox prognoses and bodily limitations. While the chronic nature of SCI enables the formation of robust and stable online communities such as CareCure, the cybersociality cultivated by people living with the immediate threat of ALS is much more contingent and ephemeral. The kinds of social connections forged online in turn shape the forms of mobilization and digital pathways to experimental medicine.

This chapter takes a closer look at the institutional practices that have enabled medical entrepreneurs to survive and even thrive in the fluctuating regulatory regime of China's emergent “market socialism.” Rather than producing better modes of governance, formal regulation has encouraged experimental practices that circumvent administrative oversight. Facing increasing challenges to their professional identities and their very livelihoods, Dr. Huang and his compatriots deploy myriad borderline tactics ranging from exploiting bureaucratic loopholes to capitalizing on technological advances in order to evade government scrutiny and attract new patients. These experimental forms of health care are pushing the limits of medical practice as they remake the boundaries between public and private, legal and illegal, ethical and unethical.