Values in tension. Clinical quality and civic participation in umbilical cord blood banking in Italy.

Abstract

In the dominant narrative of bioethics and biomedical discourse on public Umbilical Cord Blood (UCB) banking, the ethical value of donating UCB is unproblematically associated with the clinical quality of collected UCB. This article shows that this view is analytically untenable as it overlooks tensions and conflicts between the social values of donation and the clinical value of banked UCB in concrete arrangements regarding the logistics of UCB donation and collection. Adopting the notion of registers of valuing (Heuts and Mol 2013: Valuation Studies, 1, 2, 125-46) and analysing the case of the Italian network of public UCB banks and collection sites, this article shows how conflicting registers of valuing concerning UCB can shape different organisational models of UCB donation and collection, in which social values and clinical value are not unproblematically conflated. The article aims to demonstrate that the functioning of biobanking arrangements is dependent on how different values are accomplished and aligned in concrete practices of tissue donation and collection.