From the Editor's Desk

This issue sees the launch of a new series entitled Biobank Profiles that highlights biobanks in different regions. The aim is to provide thumbnail sketches of biobanks within networks across the globe. These profiles are vignettes that encompass the focus and features of each biobank and also the challenges and opportunities they face. The idea of listings or databases of biobanks is not new, and the question has been raised as to whether such vignettes are useful or necessary, and if they have a role alongside more systematic web-based catalogues with URL links to the same biobanks. Catalogues are clearly more searchable and filterable and so are primarily useful as a tool for researchers to seek out relevant collections of biospecimens. Vignettes on the other hand are intended primarily as a tool for biobanks to reference themselves. Vignettes convey the variety of design and purpose but also the unique characteristics of different biobanks and their networks. Vignettes are simply more personal.

Why is this important? For one reason, and to use the terminology of a recent editorial in this Journal, catalogues and vignettes facilitate, respectively, external and internal communication between the biobank tribes. Another reason is that catalogues and vignettes also lay different bricks in the foundation to address a wider issue. This is measuring the value of biobanks. It has been proposed that a common code or reference for biobanks should be established as a means to trace their contributions within the diffuse currents of research that lead from discovery to impacts on health. These codes could be linked through web-based catalogues to biobank URLs and so promote the notion of the biobank as a producer of knowledge.

This is an important idea to pursue, however codes provide anonymity as well as efficiency and URLs jump to single biobanks but may show little of their context and associations. Hence, there is the need for vignettes within the accessible literature to provide a counterbalance to this anonymity. If biobanks become recognized only as numbers then the intellectual input and the diversity of research enabled by biobankers may not be fully valued.

The wide spectrum of biobanks reflects the fact that biobanks are developed to support an even wider diversity of research questions and experimental approaches, some anticipated but most unknown at the time of initial design. Their diversity and creativity is best considered through the analogy of biobanks as tools in the research workshop. Some designed for nuts, others for nails, and others for different types of screws, and all ineffective without guiding hands (the intellectual input) in their selection and use. For the present, the analogy also extends of course to the organization of the typical workshop, and they are hard to find on the workbench. So catalogues are needed to trace and find biobanks before and after their use in research, and vignettes are needed to highlight the context, design and challenges of the biobank. Both are needed!