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

In the dominant narrative of bioethics and biomedical discourse on publicUmbilical Cord Blood (UCB) banking, the ethical value of donating UCB isunproblematically associated with the clinical quality of collected UCB. Thisarticle shows that this view is analytically untenable as it overlooks tensions andconflicts between the social values of donation and the clinical value of bankedUCB in concrete arrangements regarding the logistics of UCB donation andcollection. 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 ofpublic UCB banks and collection sites, this article shows how conflicting registersof valuing concerning UCB can shape different organisational models of UCBdonation and collection, in which social values and clinical value are notunproblematically conflated. The article aims to demonstrate that the functioningof biobanking arrangements is dependent on how different values areaccomplished and aligned in concrete practices of tissue donation and collection.