Immunitary bioeconomy: The economisation of life in the international cord blood market

Brown, Nik; Machin, Laura; McLeod, Danae

doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.01.024

Cited by 70 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Most prominently, concern tends to sit with how immunological difference becomes a corporeal resource through which immunities can essentially be stockpiled and exchanged (Brown et al, 2011;Brown and Williams, 2015). However, as this paper has sought to address, a sustained exploration of how race figures in this context has not been made a central element of discussion.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

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

Williams

2017

Science as Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In cases where a sibling match is not possible, clinicians can turn to stockpiles of the 'corporeal resource' of stem cells (Brown et al, 2011). The two major stockpiles are bone marrow registries and umbilical cord blood (UCB) banks.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Williams

2017

Science as Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Brown et al (2011) have shown that UCB units are traded between public biobanks and transplant centres at a price exceeding the cost of storage -thus generating an income. Klaus Hoeyer looked at the opposition narrative and profit generation arguing that the expression 'compensation of expenses' arises because the exchange of body parts does not follow either market logic or a gift exchange but is underwritten by the moral idea that body parts must be non-tradable commodities in an exchange system where price are set without generating profit (Hoeyer, 2009).…”

Section: The Organization Of Ucb Biobanksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other scholars, instead, compare personal UCB banking to the 'economy of hoarding' rather than of investment (Fannin, 2013). Private UCB banking is structured according to a "neoliberal privatised market" of biomedical services where individuals-asconsumers negotiate the possession of a biological asset (Brown et al, 2011(Brown et al, , p. 1115. Other studies have highlighted how new family duties and responsibilities are implied in private banking.…”

Section: The Organization Of Ucb Biobanksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is best provided through a global redistributive economy. However, as Brown et al have shown, public UCB banks are involved in an international trade in UCB units: the banks operate in "a market model in which the costs associated with storage are offset through pricing strategies for blood products, particularly if those products can attract a premium through international exportation" (Brown et al, 2011(Brown et al, , p. 1116. UCB units are not exchanged for free in the international circuit of public banks; instead the export price is higher than the cost of storage, and this is a source of income for UCB banks, supplementing support from charities and the state.…”

Section: The Market Of Redistributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

The hybrid bioeconomy of umbilical cord blood banking: Re-examining the narrative of opposition between public and private services

Hauskeller

Beltrame

2016

BioSocieties

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Umbilical cord blood (UCB) is an important source for stem cells used in clinical treatments. For this purpose, UCB has to be collected at birth and stored in biobanks. The discourse about UCB biobanking practices commonly holds that it occurs in two opposite economies, the public sector and a competing private one. They correspond with moral economies of gift-giving in a redistributive economy versus private ownership of cord blood in a market economy. Our analysis of UCB banking in Europe shows that this opposition narrative is both empirically and analytically unsatisfactory. Using the analytic concepts of entanglement (Callon) and biomedical platforms (Keating and Cambrosio), we demonstrate how the network of actors, objects, interests and practices in biobanking creates different kinds of value and shared issues across public and private services. Our case study illustrates how the interrelation between technical, ethical, economic and logistical considerations plays out and generates a field of practices where redistributive and market economies coexist, are co-dependent and hybridize each other. The narrative of opposition therefore can inform STS studies regarding the normative values written into the public facing side of biobanking, but bioeconomic analyses benefit from building on concepts that enable the examination of the complex interrelations between the wider network of heterogeneous elements on which UCB banking relies.

show abstract

Stem Cell Transplantation, Microchimerism and Assemblages

Shildrick

2022

Philosophy and Medicine

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The exploration of stem cell transplantation (SCT), especially as a socially situated phenomenon, demands a combination of empirical, biological and bioethical insights. Questions of identity, of gifting, and of mortality abound, and in kin SCT where the whole process happens within the complex relationships of a single unit, the intertwined impact on lived experience is highly concentrated. In looking at everything involved in the understanding of SCT – the biomedical procedure, the individual and collective experiences of the family, the data collected, the expertise and expectations of the researchers, and the varying analyses applied – what emerges, building on a Deleuzian framework, is a knowledge assemblage.

show abstract

Immunitary bioeconomy: The economisation of life in the international cord blood market

Cited by 70 publications

References 16 publications

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

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

The hybrid bioeconomy of umbilical cord blood banking: Re-examining the narrative of opposition between public and private services

Stem Cell Transplantation, Microchimerism and Assemblages

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About