Needham’s Legacy in Clinical Research Revisited: Refashioning Acupuncture with Biomedicine

This chapter aims to be an update of Needham’s approach to acupuncture, in which the career and work of Jaung-Geng Lin, the first physician of Chinese medicine to be elected an academician at Academia Sinica, is introduced. Instead of focusing on Professor Lin’s characteristic diligence, this chapter casts him and his achievements in a larger context that attempts to render this non-biomedical tradition scientific, with experiments and standards. It argues that what has made Professor Lin and his team an undeniably successful research enterprise has been his professional training in 1970s Taiwan, his insights as a practicing acupuncturist, and his networking, which has turned acupuncture into an inviting field for scientific research and a respectable clinical specialty. Tracing Professor Lin’s research career, therefore, offers an opportunity to capture a refashioning that, as Needham might have expected, is pushing acupuncture toward being an ecumenical medicine in future.