Bloody infrastructures!: Exploring challenges in cord blood collection maintenance

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe 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.