Biobanks and the reconfiguration of the living

Abstract

While previous discussions of biobanks have addressed standardization and innovations, law and ethics, governance, donation, citizenship, race, data and economy (Cromer 2017 Cromer, Risa. 2017. “Waiting. The Redemption of Frozen Embryos Through Embryo Adoption and Stem Cell Research in the United States.” In The Anthropology of the Fetus: Biology, Culture, and Society, edited by Sallie Han, Tracy K. Betsinger, and Amy B. Scott, 171–199. New York: Berghahn Books. [Google Scholar] ; Ehrich, Williams, and Farsides 2010 Ehrich, Kathryn, Clare Williams, and Bobbie Farsides. 2010. “Fresh or Frozen? Classifying ‘Spare’ Embryos for Donation to Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research.” Social Science & Medicine 71 (12): 2204–2211. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2010.09.045 [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar] ; Eriksson and Webster 2008 Eriksson, Lena, and Andrew Webster. 2008. “Standardizing the Unknown: Practicable Pluripotency as Doable Futures.” Science as Culture 17 (1): 57–69. doi: 10.1080/09505430701872814 [Taylor & Francis Online], , [Google Scholar] , 2015 Eriksson, Lena, and Andrew Webster. 2015. “Standardizing Work as a Recursive Process: Shaping the Embryonic Stem Cell Field.” New Genetics and Society 34 (1): 72–88. doi: 10.1080/14636778.2014.998818 [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], , [Google Scholar] ; Franklin 2006 Franklin, Sarah. 2006. “Embryonic Economies: The Double Reproductive Value of Stem Cells.” BioSocieties 1 (1): 71–90. doi: 10.1017/S1745855205040081 [Crossref], , [Google Scholar] ; Meskus 2018 Meskus, Mianna. 2018. Craft in Biomedical Research. New-York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan. [Crossref], , [Google Scholar] ), this special issue explores the role of biobanks in the reconfigurations of the living, as they constitute a central place in the manufacture of biological resources. Certainly, the role of biobanks as biomedical platforms playing a central role in contemporary medicine had already been highlighted by Keating and Cambrosio (2003 Keating, Peter, and Alberto Cambrosio. 2003. Biomedical Platforms: Realigning the Normal and the Pathological in Late-Twentieth-Century Medicine, Inside Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar] ). But understanding them as spaces where both a work of shaping and socializing living beings is carried out is an original research perspective. Our introduction aims to show its heuristic, which is not limited to human biobanks.