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Wong, Johnson

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Wong, Johnson
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    Global Positioning: Houqua and His China Trade Partners in the Nineteenth Century
    (2012-07-23) Wong, Johnson; Szonyi, Michael Andor; Tai, Hue-Tam Ho
    This study unearths the lost world of early-nineteenth-century Canton. Known today as Guangzhou, this Chinese city witnessed the economic dynamism of global commerce until the demise of the Canton System in 1842. Records of its commercial vitality and global interactions faded only because we have allowed our image of old Canton to be clouded by China's weakness beginning in the mid-1800s. By reviving this story of economic vibrancy, I restore the historical contingency at the juncture at which global commercial equilibrium unraveled with the collapse of the Canton system, and reshape our understanding of China's subsequent economic experience. I explore this story of the China trade that helped shape the modern world through the lens of a single prominent merchant house and its leading figure, Wu Bingjian, known to the West by his trading name of Houqua. I demonstrate that a large measure of Houqua's success stemmed from his ability to maintain an intricate balance between his commercial interests and those of his Western counterparts, all in an era of transnationalism before the imposition of the Western world order. The story of Houqua is at once local, regional, and global. Houqua’s business success certainly amplified the economic vitality in Canton. However, this analysis of his business success is less an examination of the Canton system than a study of the impact of an exceptional operator within this system who, through his personal business endeavors, set in motion changes that had ramifications for China’s development and the global system at large. His success in global business illustrates the construction of networks of trust for the purpose of facilitating economic exchange in the advent of an enforceable, unified international system of arbitration. The experience of his successors tells the story of the diverging economic fortunes of global traders operating formerly on equal footing. This is a story not only of an exceptional individual but also of the dynamic setting of transnational business when regional networks negotiated their connections in the emerging modern world.
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    Simultaneous Assessment of Cytotoxic T Lymphocyte Responses Against Multiple Viral Infections by Combined Usage of Optimal Epitope Matrices, Anti- CD3 mAb T-cell Expansion and "RecycleSpot"
    (BioMed Central, 2005) Bihl, Florian K; Loggi, Elisabetta; Chisholm, John V; Hewitt, Hannah S; Henry, Leah M; Suscovich, Todd J; Frahm, Nicole; Andreone, Pietro; Linde, Caitlyn; Wong, Johnson; Brander, Christian
    The assessment of cellular anti-viral immunity is often hampered by the limited availability of adequate samples, especially when attempting simultaneous, high-resolution determination of T cell responses against multiple viral infections. Thus, the development of assay systems, which optimize cell usage, while still allowing for the detailed determination of breadth and magnitude of virus-specific cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) responses, is urgently needed. This study provides an up-to-date listing of currently known, well-defined viral CTL epitopes for HIV, EBV, CMV, HCV and HBV and describes an approach that overcomes some of the above limitations through the use of peptide matrices of optimally defined viral CTL epitopes in combination with anti-CD3 in vitro T cell expansion and re-use of cells from negative ELISpot wells. The data show that, when compared to direct ex vivo cell preparations, antigen-unspecific in vitro T cell expansion maintains the breadth of detectable T cell responses and demonstrates that harvesting cells from negative ELISpot wells for re-use in subsequent ELISpot assays (RecycleSpot), further maximized the use of available cells. Furthermore when combining T cell expansion and RecycleSpot with the use of rationally designed peptide matrices, antiviral immunity against more than 400 different CTL epitopes from five different viruses can be reproducibly assessed from samples of less than 10 milliliters of blood without compromising information on the breadth and magnitude of these responses. Together, these data support an approach that facilitates the assessment of cellular immunity against multiple viral co-infections in settings where sample availability is severely limited.