Bloody infrastructures!: Exploring challenges in cord blood collection maintenance

ABSTRACT

The collection of umbilical cord blood, a source of stem cells for cancer treatment, has become a highly strategised process. STS scholarship has explored the moral/economic tensions of this case but focuses less on questions of infrastructure. This paper aims to flesh out our understanding of how stem cell collections maintain usefulness whilst clinical requirements change. It borrows from literature on studying ‘infrastructure’ to analyse qualitative data on the UK context, exploring how it might help to think of these collections not simply as banks, but as infrastructures. It attends to how maintenance relies on alertness to the shifting standards of ‘users’, and demonstrates that infrastructural thinking offers the heuristic richness needed to explore these important aspects of maintaining collections of biological material and sustaining them into the future. It thus provides a contribution to the STS literature on tissue banking and the growing interdisciplinary corpus on issues of infrastructure.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• archives
• cord blood
• stem cells
• biobanking

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Andrew Webster for reading the original manuscript and offering useful comments, and to the participants and organisers of the Infrastructures in practice and in flux stream at EASST Barcelona 2016, and of the 2016 Spaces of Evidence event in Exeter, where this paper was original presented. Thanks also to the anonymous peer reviewer and editor for their critical guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rosalind Williams is a Research Associate in Sociology at the University of Sheffield. She is currently working on a Leverhulme funded project, ‘Tracking Ourselves?’, focusing on everyday practices of self-monitoring. She’s written for Life Sciences, Society and Policy and New Genetics and Society.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council under [grant number ES/J500215/1].