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’.
Highlights
Over the course of several decades, 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
Our purpose here is to examine and follow umbilical cord blood units as ‘bio-objects’ (Vermeulen et al 2012) that are constitutive of particular kinds of biopolitics, new magnitudes of scale, new dimensions of internationalisation that transform and reconfigure the conventional spatial and symbolic borders of the blood economies (Copeman 2009)
We explore the construction of an immunitary regime premised on an ‘allogeneic logic’ where units of umbilical cord blood are made available through international circuits for transplantation between closely matched donors and recipients
Summary
Over the course of several decades, 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. We explore the construction of an immunitary regime premised on an ‘allogeneic logic’ where units of umbilical cord blood are made available through international circuits for transplantation between closely matched donors and recipients (self-to-other). We show how UCB banking and treatment transcends traditionally received values of the blood economies bisected between gifts and markets, between community solidarism tied to nationhood and atomistic self-interest tied to the market.
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