Enactments of Race in the UK’s Blood Stem Cell Inventory

Abstract

Recent sociological analyses of the intersections of race and science recognise race's quality as an enacted object. Through this analytic lens, race is always materialising in the practices and processes that enrol it and therefore enjoys a kind of multiplicity. The context of blood stem cell transplantation, a scientific domain marked by a more and less explicitly racialised logic, offers an opportunity to see the conceptual assertion of race's multiplicity play out. Indeed, an exploration of the UK's stem cell inventory reveals-through analysis of interviews, policy and parliamentary meetings-how race materialises in the various practices that comprise this increasingly popular cancer treatment option. Looking at practices of recruitment, inventory management and tissue selection in particular provides an interesting window to look upon race and the many signifiers that implicate it. These cases reveal moments of race's stablisation and silencing; its oscillation between the status of vital information to the life of a public stem cell inventory, and of secondary data that provides little useful information to clinicians selecting tissue. Adopting an analytic lens that attends to race's multiple enactments allows us to begin asking why enactments take the shape they do, and why the particular practices that mobilise them come to be.

‘We All Have a Responsibility to Each Other’: Valuing Racialised Bodies in the Neoliberal Bioeconomy

“…Through the development of immunological and population genetics research through the 1960s and 1970s, it is now understood that particular allelic structures of cell surfaces (the basis of locating a suitable donor for oneself) are more frequent in certain 'populations'. This understanding had a profound impact on early transplant science (Thomas, 1994;Williams, 2017a), such that the notion of race often becomes interchangeable with genetic population in this scientific community; as with the pharmaceutical drug trial, categories of difference used in scientific and social practice are rendered equivalent, reinforcing socially salient categorisations through the assertion of biological facticity, which can be mobilised, as we will see, to encourage minority participation.…”

Values in tension. Clinical quality and civic participation in umbilical cord blood banking in Italy

“…The question of identifying those sites strategically located to reach rare HLA profiles is still under debate. Contrary to the UK where the strategy of selecting maternity units has been based on a careful analysis of areas with high rates of live births from parents of different ethnicities (see Williams ), in Italy it seems that there is, at present, no clear plan. According to Biobank operator 6, the Italian Bone Marrow Donor Register (IBMDR), because of its possession of data on HLA profiles, should prepare a HLA map of Italy in order to identify the best collection sites.…”

“…In order to cover HLA variability, UCB banks adopt strategies addressed to recruit donors from different ethnic groups. This generates what Williams (: 325) has defined as ‘messy relationships’ between social classifications and race and ethnicity, classifications that often overlap with inheritance, origin and also nationality (Williams ). In her view, race and ethnicity are largely enacted by strategies of addressing potential donors among immigrants and ethnic minorities.…”

“…But UCB donation is promoted with reference to notions of public good and fairer access to HSC sources to ethnic minorities. However, in the work of Williams (, ) it seems that the combination of a biopolitics of antigens and the pursuance of social values has been obtained without triggering tensions.…”

Brexit as heredity redux: Imperialism, biomedicine and the NHS in Britain

“…There has been a general political retreat in the UK from the ideals and policies of state-sponsored multiculturalism (Gilroy, 2012), yet something different can be observed in the institutional practices of biomedicine. Multicultural policies and approaches, often explicitly linking certain groups to illnesses and diseases, have been revitalised in an era of biomedicine dominated by genome science, where genetic differences are central to genomic medicine (Hinterberger, 2018; Williams, 2018). The UK does not legally mandate enrolling ethnic minority groups in biomedical and clinical research like the USA does (see Epstein, 2008), but multicultural forms of inclusion and recognition are nonetheless increasingly fundamental to the UK’s biomedicine industry.…”