In the early 21st century, East Asian medicines are uniquely situated practices in a world of rapidly accelerating change and the relative decline of the West: attaching to distinctive non-western cultures yet claiming universal applicability; emphasising age-old practices yet capable of forging synergistic links to some of the most innovative areas of modern technoscience. Still, East Asian medicines continue to be widely described as traditions, a label that automatically casts these practices in opposition to the modernity of biomedicine and science even as in clinical research and practice these boundaries are consistently being blurred. I argue that this specific historical moment offers a unique opportunity to examine afresh the nature of East Asian medicines and their historical development. Building on my existing expertise I propose to undertake a sustained programme of research that will seek to understand East Asian medicines throughout the last one thousand years in and on their on terms. Analysing how physicians in various locales seek to solve concrete clinical problems by engaging with bodies, researching pharmaceuticals, assembling them into recipes, and debating how to achieve consistent clinical effects, we intend to build up a picture of East Asian medicine as a landscape made up of distinct styles of practice that consistently merge in and out of each other. Working in this way from the bottom up, we will seek to overcome numerous limitations to our curren t understanding of East Asian medicines that directly stems from their fixation through the discourse of modernity.

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We hypothesize that the growth and development of an ovarian follicle is regulated by hypoxia. The diffusion of oxygen from the microvasculature in the theca cell layer of the follicle through the basement membrane and the avascular granulosa cell layers to the oocyte may be insufficient to maintain normal cellular function. The results of all studies to date, using unreliable and indirect methods, support the hypothesis that the centre of the follicle, where the oocyte resides, is hypoxic. The primary aim is to apply a novel tissue partial pressure of oxygen sensor (OxyLite, Oxford Optronix) to accurately measure, for the first time, oxygen concentrations in the follicular fluid of preovulatory follicles in vivo. The data will be corroborated by immunohistochemical detection of the adducts of the extrinsic hypoxia probe, pimonidazole (adducts are formed in cells experiencing <10mmHg of oxygen). The pattern of hypoxia in ovarian follicles will be correlated with the pattern of expression of two hypoxia inducible factors (HIF1alpha and HIF2alpha) and the products of one of their target genes, glucose transporter 1. The results of this proof of principle study will form the basis of further studies investigating the role of hypoxia in follicular growth and development.