Brown, N. and Williams, R. (2015) Cord blood banking – bio-objects on the borderlands between community and immunity. Life Sciences, Society and Policy, 11. 11. ISSN 2195-7819
Abstract
Umbilical cord blood (UCB) has become the focus of intense efforts to collect, screen and bank haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in hundreds of repositories around the world. UCB banking has developed through a broad spectrum of overlapping banking practices, sectors and institutional forms. Superficially at least, these sectors have been widely distinguished in bioethical and policy literature between notions of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’, the commons and the market respectively. Our purpose in this paper is to reflect more critically on these distinctions and to articulate the complex practical and hybrid nature of cord blood as a ‘bio-object’ that straddles binary conceptions of the blood economies. The paper draws upon Roberto Esposito’s reflections on biopolitics and his attempt to transcend the dualistic polarisations of immunity and community, or the private and the public. We suggest that his thoughts on immunitary hospitality resonate with many of the actual features and realpolitik of a necessarily internationalised and globally distributed UCB ‘immunitary regime’.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2015 Brown and Williams. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
Keywords: | Bio-objects; Biopolitics; Cord blood; Community; Immunity |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Department of Sociological Studies (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 30 Jun 2017 10:51 |
Last Modified: | 18 Jul 2017 10:21 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1186/s40504-015-0029-8 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SpringerOpen |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1186/s40504-015-0029-8 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:118028 |