Biobank governance: Trends and perspectives

Abstract

Biobanks are a challenge and topic for governance. Today, biobanks are identified as a biomedical scientific/infrastructural development that warrants a political/legal/ethical reaction with the goal to integrate biobanks into the preexisting fabric of regulation, medicine, law and society. Biobank governance is always a response to sociocultural challenges and requires the building of trust, acceptance, and careful political negotiation. Biobanks are regulated in networks of governance in which the state is one actor next to others, and the ordering and structuring of the interaction between biobanks, society, and politics operates through a variety of actors, on different levels and along particular rationalities. Such networks of governance reflect, to some extent, a postregulatory state in which governance has become a complicated architecture and field of action involving a multitude of forces and rationalities. Biobank governance is still a relatively new field of political-legal intervention and it will be crucial for the future of biobanks to establish governance regimes that appropriately link research with society and politics. Copyright © 2007 S. Karger AG.