Affective Economies in Blood Banks and Biobanks: Vital Accounting from US Transfusion Medicine to Genetic Research, 1935–1990

Abstract

Abstract Medical blood banks and research biobanks are frequently figured as immobile middlemen in the larger machinations of biomedicine, possessing little power to influence the meaning or mobilisation of the biomaterials they accumulate. However, as the institutions that facilitate the collection and circulation of blood for a variety of purposes, blood and biobanks—much like their financial namesakes—legitimate certain practices and constitute the conditions of possibility for others. By following the ‘banking’ metaphor from its origins in 1930s US blood banking through global research specimen collection in the latter half of the century, this essay argues that economic rhetoric has worked to reproduce systems of classed and raced inequity within the circulation of blood through US medicine and research, in turn shifting the affective valences of raced and classed bodies as donors, patients and research subjects.