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Machine learning approaches are being developed to contribute to the treatment of patients and the organisation of care. These new approaches are created in complex environments that include data and computational models as well as new practices, roles and competencies. In such settings, individualised conceptions of agents bearing responsibility need rethinking. In response, we elaborate on the concept of epistemic responsibility based on De la Bellacasa's work on care (Bellacasa, M.P. de la. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press). To better understand these complex environments and the dynamics of responsibility, we use an ethnographic approach and followed Dutch healthcare professionals who learned the basics of (supervised) machine learning, while they pursued a project in their organisations during a four-month-long course. The professionals struggled with different interdependencies and this brought responsibility-in-the-making into relief. Rather than seeing (growing) relations and impure entanglements as standing in the way of responsibility, we show how connections are worthy of inquiry. We argue that connections are essential to knowledge and that producing epistemic responsibility means considering these embedded relations. In contrast to calls for control and clarification of machine learning techniques, and warnings that they create irresponsible black boxes, our care approach shows how responsibility-in-the-making reveals opportunities for ethical reflection and action. Our approach attends to how humans and non-humans are engaged in caring, reveals patterns around kinds of responsibility, and points to opportunities for avoiding neglect and irresponsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biobanks, traditionally sources of tissues, have been redefined as repositories of genetic material. As such, they have been taken up in the move to genomics and have grown from modest repositories of well-documented, local tissue-sample collections to large-scale bioinformatics resources with a national or supranational scope. The records contained in these new biobanks aim to link clinical, life course and environmental, and genetic information at the level of populations and are therefore important infrastructures linking genes and society. In our study of two such biobanks, we have focussed on the metaphors used to discuss these initiatives in various discourses. We explore how biobanks become sites for working out the issues associated with biomedia. Les biobanques, traditionnellement sources de tissus, ont ete redefinies comme des depositaires de materiaux genetiques. Elles ont ete entrainees dans le mouvement vers la genomique et sont passees de modestes depositaires de collections d'echantillons de tissus tres documentees et locales a des ressources bioinformatiques a grande echelle, ayant une etendue nationale ou supranationale. Les dossiers contenus dans ces nouvelles biobanques ont pour but de lier la clinique, le cours de la vie et l'environnement a l'information genetique au niveau des populations et sont, par consequent, des infrastructures importantes liant les genes a la societe. Dans cette etude portant sur deux biobanques semblables, les auteurs se sont concentres sur les metaphores utilisees dans differents discours pour discuter de ces initiatives et analysent la facon dont les biobanques deviennent des lieux pour comprendre les questions associees aux biomedias., INSOFAR AS BIOBANKS MOVE the Human Genome Project (HGP) into a new phase, they link genetics, environment and function as tools for redefining health and illness. Insofar as biobanks link [...]