Abstract
Biobanking in Singapore is characterized by contested relations between funding ambitions and research practices, and different notions of what the (potential) value of storing samples and data for medical research is. Different biobanking efforts anticipate the production of public goods from stored materials in specifically situated ways. These efforts to produce public goods in the form of scientific and economic value can be fruitfully understood in terms of extraction, a complex sociotechnical process of retrieving (potential) value from raw materials, which both informs and is informed by specific social values. In exploring the extraction of potential value in relation to practice values, I propose the notion of value formations to account for the coproduction of and intersections between different forms of value(s) in scientific practices situated in particular social contexts. I trace value formations across the life span of biobanking collections, which range from recruitment, collection, and processing of samples to their storage, retrieval, and use. Observations along this life span show the social and temporal complexity of value-making in biobanking in Singapore, pointing to the contextual specificity of how biobanking is understood as a public good.
Introduction
“Samples are precious,” the data manager of a research institute in Singapore observed while we discussed efforts to keep track of the samples collected in the institute’s various studies. Since the government invested heavily in biomedical sciences around the turn of the millennium, this phrase reflects the ambitions to establish biomedical research as a pillar of economic growth through the Biomedical Sciences Initiative. This initiative builds on a well-established approach to economic development in Singapore, which aims to combine lessons learned from abroad with ambitious plans and substantial investments into technologically advanced sectors (S. A. Lee 2007; E. Lee 2008; Trocki 2009). Since investments in biomedical research were new to Singapore (Clancey 2012), the first phase of the initiative included the establishment of various research institutes and support facilities. This included a centralized facility for the storage of tissue samples called the Singapore Tissue Network (STN). Researchers could store materials collected in research projects financed by national funding agencies there for free, thereby making them accessible to other researchers as well. The aim of the STN was thereby twofold: it both sought to harmonize storage quality and availability of samples with state-of-the-art technologies, in order to facilitate widespread sharing of and scientific collaboration around these materials, which was ultimately supposed to generate economic value for Singapore. In light of Singapore’s ambitions in the life sciences, both samples and the network itself were considered precious in terms of their potential to contribute to the emergence of a knowledge-based economy (Yew 2011).
While samples were considered precious for their economic potential in the context of Singaporean research policy, the aforementioned data manager referred to their value for scientific practice instead. By the time the interview took place in 2013, the STN had been closed for two years. Rising costs and lack of use of the collection were commonly cited as the main reasons for the Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR), Singapore’s main biomedical research funder, to discontinue funding for the repository (Chan 2012; Chang 2011). Yet tissue storage facilities within university hospitals and research institutes had existed before and continued to exist after the STN closed. The data manager indicated that samples are precious while drawing a table to illustrate how samples collected by the institute had been scattered around Singapore after STN closed. Because samples were precious, it was important to keep track of them and to try and get them back in one place—or at least to have a comprehensive overview of where they were located. Here, samples are considered precious for two reasons: in terms of the effort required to collect, characterize and store them, and for their potential to contribute to the production of certified medical knowledge.
The different economic and scientific interpretations of how samples may be considered “precious” points to the sometimes-contested relations between funding ambitions and research practices in Singapore, and what it would mean to extract value from stored materials. These tensions are often formulated in terms of critiques of the primary economic orientation of biomedical research in Singapore, in which the population is said to be involved only as tissue donors and research subjects, without sharing in the returns of investments in research (Holden and Demeritt 2008; Waldby 2009). Such evaluations of biomedical research in Singapore map onto the complex politics of health care in Singapore where population-wide health care delivery is entangled with an emphasis on competition, excellence, and individual responsibility, while soundly rejecting the “welfare state” label (Hasseltine 2013; Lim 2010). Nevertheless, the state promotes biomedical research in terms of public goods of economic competitiveness and growth, international prestige, and improved health care. Moreover, the investments have had profound effects in terms of establishing the biomedical research landscape in Singapore (Fischer 2012; 2013), where researchers navigate government ambitions in relation to their own interests and priorities (Coopmans and Tan 2018; Coopmans, Graham, and Hamzah 2012). These efforts to produce public goods in the form of scientific and economic value can be fruitfully understood in terms of extraction. Extraction may be understood as a complex sociotechnical process of retrieving (potential) value from raw materials, which both informs and is informed by specific social values incorporated in extraction practices (Gilberthorpe and Rajak 2017). To explore biobanking in Singapore in these terms, I first conceptualize the relation between potential value and values in practice in conversation with the STS discourse on value production in the life sciences in the next section. Subsequently, I trace the articulation of what I will call value formations across the life span of biobanking collections, which range from recruitment, collection, and processing of samples to their storage, retrieval, and use. Based on this mapping of value formations in different biobanking initiatives in Singapore, I conclude that more context-sensitive explorations of biobanking as a public good can contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of making biobanking valuable.
Value Formations in the Coproduction of Biobanking Potentiality and Practices
Over the past few decades, biobanks have become a crystallization point of some of the key concerns and expectations surrounding biomedical research in the postgenomic era. In very basic terms, biobanks may be defined as “structured collections of biological samples and associated data stored for the purpose of present and future research” (Parodi 2015, 15) and distinguished in terms of, for example, their purpose of representing a specific population or containing materials related to specific diseases (Kinkorová 2016). As such, biobanks raise a number of ethical issues, ranging from traditional bioethical concerns related to donor autonomy and anonymity to questions concerning ownership and control over stored materials (Cambon-Thomsen, Rial-Sebbag, and Knoppers 2007; Gottweis and Lauss 2010; Kaye and Stranger 2009; Widdows and Cordell 2011). Beyond the ethics of biobanks and biobank-based research, sample and data collections that reflect the biology of larger human collectives are also tied into issues of (national) identity, public health services, and scientific proficiency (Busby and Martin 2006; Winickoff 2006; Gottweis and Petersen 2008). Furthermore, the inclusion of samples and data from large numbers of individuals positions biobanks as promising support structures for large-scale (primarily genetic) research (Chalmers 2011) as well as for the “translation” of basic research findings into clinical applications and marketable products (Murtagh et al. 2011). The latter implies that biobanks have widely been expected to contribute significantly to the scientific and economic potential of contemporary biomedical research.
The promise that benefits from biobanks established in the present would arise at some point in the future has been a prime reason for many government agencies around the world to establish (national) biobanking projects in the first decade of this century (Busby and Martin 2006; Fortun 2008; Kaiser 2002). The STN is one example of such initiatives. Yet the commercial potential of biobanks, in particular, has increasingly been questioned (Turner, Dallaire-Fortier, and Murtagh 2013; Caulfield et al. 2014). Doubts about biobanks’ economic viability overlap with debates within the STS discourse on the relation between biomedical research and capitalism, often cast in terms of biocapital or the bioeconomy (see, e.g., Pavone and Goven 2017). Initial formulations of this relation that focused on the speculative value of biological materials that could generate market commodities from technical manipulation of and knowledge production on the stuff of life (Sunder Rajan 2006; Cooper 2008; Waldby and Mitchell 2006) have been criticized for fetishizing the biological in what is in effect a broader transformation of contemporary capitalism (Birch and Tyfield 2013). Moreover, these critics maintain that speculative value is not to be found in biological materials themselves but rather in ownership and control over knowledge assets that generate capital through rent and access rights (Pinel 2021; Birch and Muniesa 2020; Chiapetta and Birch 2018). Still others point to the limitations of framing the economic promise of the life sciences exclusively in terms of capital. They argue that a notion such as “bioeconomy” is also mobilized as part of a wider political program that positions biomedical innovation as a response to a wider range of social problems (Petersen and Krisjansen 2015; Goven and Pavone 2015). Seen in these terms, the value of biomedical research materials—including those stored in biobanks—can take a variety of forms beyond the economic, with specific forms of value being not only ascribed in policy designs but also through the practices of collecting, handling, storing, and working with materials and data (Beltrame and Hauskeller 2018; Datta Burton et al. 2021).
In light of the different forms of value biobanks are expected to generate in different contexts and the often contentious relations between different understandings of when and how materials can be (made) valuable, the relation between biobanking practices and visions of anticipated value require more extensive analysis (Tupasela 2017). To that end, I use Jasanoff’s (2004) formulation of the coproduction of knowledge and social order, and its applications in the context of the life sciences in particular, as an analytical lens. Jasanoff takes the well-established idea in STS that technoscience and the social cannot be adequately understood as distinct entities (see also Latour 1993, 2005) to propose an analytical approach in which the way knowledge is produced must be understood in correlation with the way social institutions, values, identities, and so on operate. Work in this mode focusing on the life sciences has directed its attention particularly to the way acts of defining and constructing (new) forms of life obtain social meaning (Reardon 2017) through legal and political classification and recognition (Jasanoff 2012; Winickoff 2015). Thus, differences in sociopolitical values may account for distinct biotechnology policies, regulations (Jasanoff 2005) and patent regimes (Parthasarathy 2017) across jurisdictions. Moreover, the mutual configuration of what Jasanoff describes as the constitutions of life and law (Jasanoff 2011) as well as other institutional forms of social power are not limited to present biological forms. Rather, present understandings of the potentiality of life (Taussig, Hoeyer, and Helmreich 2013) in terms of future epistemic and economic value (Sunder Rajan 2006) intersects with normative values that shape practical engagements with life in contemporary research (Sunder Rajan 2012; Aarden 2017a). Along these lines, I propose that articulations of various forms of potential value that may be generated from biobanking projects must be understood as both productive and a product of sociocultural values shaping biobanking practices.
To understand the mutual configuration (or coproduction) of potential value and values-in-practice in different biobanking efforts in Singapore, I propose the notion of value formations as shorthand for describing the complex intersections between different forms of value(s). This conceptual intervention stresses how the value of something is always the outcome of situated practices of making things valuable (Dussauge, Helgesson, and Lee 2015), and how these outcomes come about with often contentious reference to anticipated forms of value that inform, are informed by, and conflict with (scientific) practice (Martin 2018; Fortun 2008). For biobanking in Singapore, tracing what it means to say that samples are precious thus entails consideration of not only the potential economic and scientific value of sample and data collections but also of values incorporated in the various phases of materials’ (meaning samples and data) life span, which ranges from donor recruitment and material collection to their processing, storage, retrieval and use. Along this life span, value is shaped by various sociotechnical processes that shape the provenance of the materials (Parry and Greenhough 2018), (manipulation of) their material form (Waldby and Mitchell 2006), and various “routine tasks that tend to data” (Nadim 2016, 498), such as the care clinicians and research staff take to secure the quality and value of data (Pinel, Prainsack, and McKevitt 2020), practices of data storage, preparation, and packaging that facilitate their travel (Leonelli 2016) and many more. I show how different forms of potential and practices intersected in the value formations of various biobanking projects in Singapore below.
Method
In the remainder of this paper, I describe the intersections between how values shape biobanking practices and (potential) value is ascribed to stored materials in different biobanking efforts in Singapore. My focus is on the role of biobanking in biomedical research as both a scientific and economic project in Singapore, particularly in the context of the STN, two biobanks that existed both in parallel and subsequent to the STN, and a research institute that may be understood as a user of different biobanks. Within these contexts, I trace different value formations as the intersections of values informing biobanking practice and of value expected to be generated from biobanking activities. Throughout this analysis, I identify tensions around prioritizations of values and temporal expectations, which do not always map directly onto oppositions between scientific and political or economic interests. Rather, these tensions provide inside into challenges for making biobanking valuable that extend far beyond the biomedical research context in Singapore, which is often characterized as a top-down policy design with little concern for scientists’ expertise.
In the following sections, I draw from a combination of qualitative research materials that were primarily collected during five weeks of fieldwork in Singapore in the Spring of 2013. I interviewed thirteen individuals involved in the various biobanking projects. Five interviews were conducted together with my host, an STS scholar with an interest in medical research in Singapore that partially overlapped with my work on biobanking. Interview respondents included staff of research institutions and government officials—although these identities are difficult to distinguish, since many people in Singapore shift roles, or hold multiple positions at the same time. One interview respondent invited me to a biobank staff meeting, which provided more insight into how collections are managed, and I participated in two public events on biomedicine and society at the National University of Singapore, which helped in situating biobanking in a broader context. Additionally, I conducted a content analysis of articles on the tissue network in Singaporean newspapers and traced perspectives on biomedical research in Singapore presented in publications from the Nature and Science journal conglomerates. In my analysis, I used the mapping techniques of situational analysis (Clarke 2005); initially to order the many different ways the brief history of the STN was recounted in various materials. For this paper, I expanded this analysis to also trace how different value-notions are articulated with regard to other biobanking initiatives, which allows me to turn my analytical gaze toward broader and diverse value formations of biobanking in Singapore. I follow these formations across the life span of samples and data in the next section. For analytical purposes, I distinguish between phases of recruitment, collection, storage, sharing, and use, exploring how values concerning how biobanking ought to be done in practice get shaped together with ideas of collections’ present and (potential) future value.
Value Formations in Singapore Biobanking Initiatives
Situating Value Formations in Donor Recruitment and Collecting Samples
Biobanking is often imagined in terms of future economic and scientific value, but recruitment and collection are substantively shaped by the specific situation of Singapore. In terms of anticipated value, Singapore’s ethnic diversity—usually categorized in terms of Chinese, Indian, Malay, and “other” descent—is rendered especially important. Both Singapore’s geographical location and ethnic diversity position the country as a gateway to Asia and a regional research hub, an emphasis that in turn reinforces ethnic identifications and hierarchies within the population (Ong 2013; 2015). Ethnic diversity is also considered important in research projects, which often focus on specific ethnic groups and supposed—but often not materializing—ethnic differences in disease prevalence and predispositions (Coopmans and Tan 2018). It should therefore not be surprising that ethnicity is also an important criterion in the recruitment of research participants and sample donors for biobanks.
Nevertheless, the STN did not actively pursue ethnic diversity or representativeness of the population in its collection strategy, despite the central rhetorical role of ethnicity in promoting Singapore as a research site. This is a consequence of the setup and aims of the STN. It was set up as a centralized repository for storing samples that researchers receiving grants from national funding agencies had collected. One former government official argued that this structure was intended to control storage costs and to harmonize storage quality, yet it also meant the STN had relatively little control over what was in its collection. Since the Network did not directly recruit donors it had no clear, uniform collection strategy and formed a hybrid of collections that are usually seen as substantially different in the biobanking literature, including both “liquid” samples (e.g., blood, urine, saliva) from a randomly selected, representative cohort of (usually healthy) individuals from a population and “solid” samples (e.g., tumor tissue) collected from specific patient groups of interest. These different kinds of collections require different kinds of recruitment and collection strategies that intersect with their social environment in distinct ways.
Recruitment of solid tissue donors commonly does not involve much more than getting patients’ consent for storing biopsied tissues and using them for research, yet recruitment from the general population for donation and participation in research often requires more substantial engagement. Collections ideally include random participants representative of a broader population. As one researcher explains recruitment, “[y]ou can survey a whole area, but we used a little bit of a trick, using the electoral register, a compulsory register of citizens.” Based on that register, potential participants are identified and invited to participate. At one research institute where I conducted several interviews, potential participants that met criteria such as age, ethnicity, and medical history were invited via several routes, including telephone calls, written invitations, and house visits.
Ethnicity was not only considered valuable for the supposed representativeness of Singapore’s population for some major ethnic groups in Asia and the opportunities it offered to study certain diseases in nonwhite populations. Ethnicity was also mobilized as a recruitment tool that might increase participation and thus the value of a collection in a biomedical research paradigm where the size of a cohort is seen as a mark of scientific significance. One recruitment officer therefore explains: We do ethnic matching, of course. Otherwise, you don’t speak the language. Because these are usually people who aren’t educated, who stay at home and don’t speak English.…Because if you open the door and it’s not your own people, you don’t speak my lingo and you look so different, then the confidence is usually not there to want to join.
Specific social values play a similarly instrumental role in collecting samples and data from recruited individuals. The interview on study recruitment, for example, took place in a research institute that primarily does research on elderly people, which confronts some specific challenges in getting participants to come to the clinic to participate in physical examinations, questionnaires, and collection of blood and other samples. Study participants in this age-group often rely on their children to visit the clinic, which the institute seeks to take into account in its opening hours. An official explains how many people come on Saturday mornings as “the ideal times for relatives to bring them over, because they are elderly.” This observation was presented as part of a broader reflection on how study operations are interwoven with social structure. Another issue this person addressed was the disintegration of family ties—itself a trope of how Singapore drifts away from traditional Asian values—which is said to leave many older people alone and neglected. They thus describe how, “when they agree to come, we will have the recruiting officer take a cab to their homes, gather a few, bring them in and afterward bring them back.” Furthermore, clinic staff provides additional care (e.g., food) for people who appear neglected and unable to care for themselves. The clinic then uses an extensive checklist to make sure that all examinations are performed, so “you know you can safely send the participant home, because you have collected everything you need for the study.” Social values such as care for the elderly and concern for social coherence thereby serve to make sure that the amount and quality of collected samples and data increase the value of a collection.
Value and Costs in Tissue Processing and Storage
After navigating social values and expectations in donor recruitment and the collection of materials, biobanks accentuate what is considered of value in stored materials in the processes by which they are processed and stored. This may be illustrated by the, technically comparatively complex, sample “harvesting” and preparation procedures for solid tissue samples. The director of a large tissue bank explained how samples are taken from (tumor) tissue removed during surgery. Only tumors with a diameter of at least 2 cm can be used, and these need to be collected within twenty minutes of removal from the body. These tumors are then cut into slices, and consecutive slices are alternately used for storage and for quality control and description of the tumor’s composition. Information such as time of collection, preparation and storage, and a detailed “specimen history” of everything that is done with the sample are recorded. Samples can only be used for research once diagnostics on a patient has concluded, and the tissue is therefore no longer needed for that purpose. All these measures serve to secure the quality, and thereby the value, of each individual sample.
Collectively, the value of samples depends on the kinds of research they can be used for. To extend that range, a tissue bank manager explains why tumor samples are collected in what he calls an “unscheduled” manner: We do not only collect what we actually need, but all tumors. There is a simple reason: retinoblastoma is a rare tumor. If I start collecting when I have a request, it may take twenty years. So, to facilitate research a biobank must collect all tumors.
The value formations informing tissue processing and storage in this biobank may be contrasted with the priorities of the STN. Since STN did not collect directly, securing the quality of samples collected elsewhere and then transported to the repository was key. A former STN administrator gives the following example: We also got them [contributors] sample kits to keep the specimen. We were interested in quality, so we did not want them to store the tissue in any form, we only wanted them to use very good containers that could stand the heat from transport. So, we had cooler boxes with thermocontrol where we could measure temperature. So, from the time of harvesting, put it in the box that we could be sure it remained at 4°C until its arrival at STN.
The visibility of a high-tech storage facility did not have the same value for the director of the university-based tissue repository where many samples from STN were transferred once it closed. He told me how he moved samples to a generic warehouse in the port district and cut costs by releasing most of the staff and replacing them by a remote monitoring system. For him, recognition of storage quality by international standards and organizations was much more important. He therefore subjected the biobank to a proficiency test from the international biobanking organization International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories and (at the time) pursued accreditation by the College of American Pathologists. He further stressed the importance of standard operating procedures such as transferring samples to the repository, labeling, and storing within two hours of collection and coordinating with researchers’ collection schedules. Different biobanking initiatives in Singapore thus show how distinct technical and procedural aspects of sample processing applied in the present were valued vis-à-vis the expected value of collections in the future.
Another important component of the relation between the present and (potential) future value of a collection consists of maintaining it toward the point where potential manifests as real. For the STN, the design decision to make storage and access to samples free for researchers proved fateful, especially in combination with a lack of interest among anticipated industry partners to pay a fee to access the collection. As a result, costs of storage continued to rise without income from a source other than the national research budget. Moreover, one researcher illustrates how storage expenses did not align with the time frames of research funding: A researcher gets funding for a cohort study and wants to follow up for twenty-five years, but only has funding for five years. STN provides space for storage. The first five years there was funding and STN did not charge, so they collect and store thousands of samples. After five years, the PI has no more funding. So, STN is stuck with the samples, there is no more funding and they’re supposed to be kept for twenty-five years. That is not sustainable.
These challenges are described in detail by the managers of remaining biobanks, who argue that they cannot convince users of the substantial costs of biobanks, since they have gotten used to free storage. One biobank manager invited me to a staff meeting in which he showed presentation slides listing statistics on the percentage of samples that had been withdrawn for use in research, how many of these contributed to publications, what the impact factor of the journals was, etc. While these numbers were all understood as indicators of (scientific) value, he also showed how potential value was not realized in many cases. He illustrated how costs could become prohibitive in those cases by pointing to the low retrieval rate (percentage of samples used). He had already discussed this in an earlier interview to show the limitations of user fees, asking, “[f]or every hundred pieces I harvest, I may have only one being withdrawn. Who is going to pay for the ninety-nine others?” With this rhetorical question, he pointed not only to the temporal paradox between the costs of present biobanking operations and their potential future value but also indicated how other researchers’ interest in retrieving materials contain their own value formations.
Sample Sharing and the Value Formations of Scientific Practice
For samples and data to be used in research, they first need to be withdrawn from storage facilities and be made available to researchers. Yet making samples available to researchers who have not collected them (i.e., sharing) is a contested topic in biobanking practice, surrounded by different views of values scientists should adhere to, which correlate in a specific way with how (future) value is imagined. In the STN, for example, researchers who had not collected samples could get access by applying directly to the Network, which did not prescribe precise rules for how the samples it contained could be used. Evaluation of research projects for which materials were requested was left to funding agencies and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). A former A*STAR official describes how researchers requesting samples and those who initially collected them would then be connected: We could link the samples to investigators and told the PI who wanted to interrogate these tissues where they came from; and you can work with them. Then it would be truly collaborative.…We hoped it would break down the barriers of competition in such a small country.…So, we were only a matchmaker, not actively persuading individuals to work on anything.
The STN not only sought to facilitate collaboration by providing free storage of and access to samples. It was also set up in such a way that researchers would have to collaborate to make optimal use of the materials. The main design feature of the STN to achieve this purpose was to provide only limited information on the samples. A former STN administrator explains how this information was critical to giving some semblance of what the tissue is about, without clinical data. So, you know, male, female, age and tumor type. There was nothing else about the condition, how it was treated, medical history. It was just to allow us, if somebody wants liver cancer samples from females of Chinese origins, then we could find that.
However, many researchers saw the decision to instigate collaboration by not including clinical data with the samples, in combination with the centralized decision-making about who would get access to the samples, as a severe flaw in the STN. One researcher summarized this point of view as follows: They wanted us to put samples in and some minimal clinical data. That by itself is not very useful, because what is the point? You need deep clinical phenotyping. There is no use for DNA if you don’t know if a person has diabetes, hypertension. All that data was separate.
Various respondents described the lack of willingness to collaborate and share materials as a key challenge for research in Singapore. Although reluctance to share is also a strongly debated issue in European biobanking initiatives (Tupasela 2021), it is often ascribed to a competitive Asian culture or the novelty of biomedical research in Singapore. Researchers acknowledge that the value of their collections can advance through widespread use but also indicate that the effort required to collect, store, and maintain samples and data often makes researchers reluctant to share. This is expressed in complex considerations regarding what to share, under which circumstances, and with whom that researchers presented in interviews. They mentioned a number of criteria they would consider. Chief among them were questions of a study’s quality, the amount of material requested and whether the person responsible for collecting the samples would receive anything in return (e.g., in the form of coauthorship). Not all biobanks used the same criteria, although increasing the scientific value of a collection appeared critical to all of them. While collaboration as such was an undisputed value in the design of the STN, collaboration was linked to values related to the quality of research and recognition of the labor invested in sample collection in other biobanks. Consideration of such distinct dimensions of how the potential value of a collection may be realized also shaped how sample use was believed to contribute to its value.
Realizing Value from Potential in Practices of Sample Use
One researcher suggested that the main issue to consider before sharing materials is “can you answer a major question?” From his point of view, a sample can realize its value through the way it is used. Sample collections can contribute to the value of medical research since—to paraphrase another researcher—studies that use biological materials are better studies. Samples allow measurements that are supposed to produce more reliable research data than clinical descriptions do. This idea extends to the sharing of material, which can contribute to the epistemic value of a collection if different people, with different questions, who may use different methods and analytical technologies, investigate a set of samples. Value can then be increased through continued and diverse studies of the same set of samples and data, contributing to the generation of “a wealth of data.” The notion of wealth in this context refers to how data achieves value through use and multiplication: the presence of lots of data on a collection of samples makes it of sustained interest (or valuable) for further research. The more well-known and well-characterized a collection is, this perspective suggests, the more likely it is to generate additional value in the form of scientific knowledge.
Such detailed characterization of and knowledge on a collection form the realization of the potential value that is anticipated when a collection is started. One researcher reflects on this dynamic by stating: The question is always: why were samples collected in the first place? I guess that is part of scientific curiosity, with all of the recent advances in biotechnology, so you can always say: you have one thing in your head and do that, but the reason for collecting all these samples is that in the future there may be new questions. That’s the basic reason for a biobank.
The divergence between this long-term perspective on value generation and A*STAR’s expectation that the STN would bear economic fruit within ten years form an important reason for why the Network closed (Aarden 2017b). Researchers acknowledge that this biobank was established to generate economic value in the context of the Biomedical Sciences Initiative, but consider its time line, based on A*STAR’s five-year plans, to be shortsighted. Nevertheless, a senior official indicates that applied (economic and clinical) value was the primary aim by linking the network’s structure to the widely circulating trope of “translational research”: STN was established because it was identified that in order to do good translational research you needed tissue…And it was thought it should be centralized, because then everyone could have access.
In addition to generating value through translation, the STN itself was expected to generate economic value. A senior research administrator illustrates this purpose as follows: All investments in biomedical science in Singapore had an economic goal. Some people, including [former A*STAR director and architect of the Biomedical Sciences Initiative] Philip Yeo had a biobank as support infrastructure in mind, but even then, every unit has key performance indicators and they always include an industrial component. I am not against that, but the question is whether you have the right indicators and if you are not expecting results too soon.
Once it became clear that the economic benefits of storing tissue would not materialize in the short term, A*STAR terminated funding for STN and closed the facility early in 2011. This decision forms one instance of several reforms made in light of the expectations that economic returns would begin to accrue in the third fiver-year phase of the Biomedical Sciences Initiative (Fischer 2013; Nature 2010). Representatives of various government organizations I interviewed considered the decision legitimate and pointed to the problems STN faced as well as the efforts to sustain biobanking in Singapore by returning samples to researchers and making various resources (such as freezers) available to successor biobanks for free. Many researchers, on the other hand, considered the decision to be very sudden and felt that the measures taken to return tissues were uncoordinated and not sufficient. More importantly, however, researchers feared that A*STAR’s unrealistic time line for returns on its investments may have done lasting damage to biobanking in Singapore. In their view, the particular value formations leading to STN’s demise may also upset the potential value of other biobanks.
Value Formation and the Extraction of Public Goods from Biobanking Materials
One data manager’s observation that samples are precious, cited at the beginning of this paper, entails various perspectives on the (potential) value samples contain as well as a range of values that informs how samples are treated. I explored the various manifestations of both present and future potential and practical value(s) of sample and data materials collected in Singapore’s biobanks. I proposed the notion of value formations as a heuristic for capturing the coproduction of scientific, economic, social, and other forms of value in different biobanking efforts, showing how expectations and promises surrounding such efforts are formed in interaction with approaches to how materials can and should be handled in the present. I traced how such value formations manifest along the various phases of materials’ life span, which ranges from donor recruitment to use in research and innovation. Key observations along this life span include the profound situatedness of recruitment and collection in the context of valuations of Singapore’s ethnic composition and of its changing social structure; the anticipation of future value through the way materials and operating procedures are valued in the present, and the different temporal imaginations and practical values surrounding sharing and use of stored materials. These observations contribute to understanding how the relations between scientific and social meanings of stored materials may change over time (Kowal, Radin, and Reardon 2013) and anticipated forms of value attributed to these materials can either come to fruition or fail to do so via always already value-laden practices of sample and data handling.
With the notion of value formations, I thereby make a modest intervention in the bioeconomy and capitalism discourse in STS. Focusing on sample and data collections should not be understood as a resurrection of the “fetishization” (Birch and Tyfield 2013) of biological objects or information, which indeed only acquire (economic) value through a range of practices (Chiapetta and Birch 2018). However, considering samples and data as materials from which value may possibly be extracted by means of specific, value-laden, practices magnifies how the intersections of various forms of value(s) in biobanking always reflect distinct ways in which tissue and data collection for medical research are perceived as a public good. While much of the analysis of present bioeconomies and capitalism in the life sciences (rightfully) focuses on grand policy designs and imaginations (Goven and Pavone 2015; Petersen and Krisjansen 2015) as well as the speculative dimensions of value (Birch and Tyfield 2013; Sunder Rajan 2006), I have aimed to demonstrate that such future forms of value cannot be separated from present views of how research materials and scientific practices are embedded in their surroundings. In terms of resource extractions from human biological materials vis-à-vis the production of public goods, value formations thus suggest that both future potential and present practices of biobanking can serve a public good, which may however be contested and defined in conflicting ways. Emphasizing how biobanking is supposed to serve a public good thereby foregrounds questions about the relations between the promise of biomedical innovation and present concerns of population health and public accountability (Benjamin 2013) as, for example, consideration of values such as care for the elderly or desires for the recognition of scientific labor in the circulation of materials would suggest.
Tracing the complexity of value formations in biobanking in Singapore further suggests a richer understanding of biomedical research there as an alleged public good. While the state’s argument that research would contribute to improved health care and economic growth for the population has been critiqued in terms of the government’s lack of public accountability and engagement (Holden and Demeritt 2008), the work of Singapore’s research institutions has been integrated into international scientific and professional relations that extend beyond the conditions set by the state. Fischer (2018) describes these relations as qualitative networks of mentorship, funding and collaboration that shape scientific efforts in countries like Singapore and warns against methodological nationalism that overemphasizes ready-made nation-centric accounts of scientific projects in Asia. While not denying that the particular sociopolitical surroundings of Singapore have an effect on how science is done and valued, his perspective suggests that the relations between science and government, or between scientific and economic value, are tightly interwoven rather than in direct opposition. Accounting for such intersections in terms of value formations does not only shed a different light on the sociotechnical specificity of biobanking in Singapore but suggests a context- and practice-sensitive approach to understanding how samples are made precious elsewhere, too.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank all interview respondents in Singapore for providing insight into their practices and visions. Tembusu College at the National University of Singapore and Catelijne Coopmans, in particular, were welcoming hosts and conversation partners throughout my research. Ana Delgado Aleman, Susanne Bauer, and two anonymous reviewers provided helpful comments on previous versions of this paper.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: FP7 People: Marie-Curie Actions (PIOF-GA-2010-272996).
