1. Partnership in U.K. Biobank: A Third Way for Genomic Property?
- Author
-
David E. Winickoff
- Subjects
Adult ,Genetic Research ,Property (philosophy) ,Poison control ,Public administration ,0603 philosophy, ethics and religion ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,Resource (project management) ,Databases, Genetic ,Humans ,Medicine ,030212 general & internal medicine ,Aged ,Biological Specimen Banks ,Genome, Human ,business.industry ,Health Policy ,Corporate governance ,Ownership ,Politics ,06 humanities and the arts ,General Medicine ,Property analysis ,Middle Aged ,Biobank ,Community-Institutional Relations ,Tissue Donors ,United Kingdom ,Issues, ethics and legal aspects ,Models, Organizational ,General partnership ,060301 applied ethics ,business ,Strengths and weaknesses - Abstract
Although scientific and commercial excitement about genomic biobanks has subsided since the biotech bust in 2000, they continue to fascinate life scientists, bioethicists, and politicians alike. Indeed, these assemblages of personal health information, human DNA, and heterogeneous capital have become and remain important events in the ethics and politics of the life sciences. For starters, they continue to reveal and produce the central scientific, technological, and economic paradigms so ascendant in biology today: genome, infotech, and market. Biobanks also illustrate what might be called the new distributive politics of biomedical research. Within those politics, the commodification of persons – or at the very least, of their informational representations – has challenged the ontological, ethical, and political underpinnings of the social contract between researchers and their human research subjects. In brief, biobanks are unsettling relations between genes, tissue, medical records, and persons (both individual and collective). But it is also clear that these relations are increasingly being restructured by new rights of control, access, exclusion, and use known as “property,” both material and intellectual.
- Published
- 2007