Market-driven production of biospecimens and the role of NHS hospital-led biobanks

Biobanks are vital for biospecimen production in research, despite the regulatory, recruitment and commercial difficulties they face. We conducted interviews with clinicians, researchers, volunteers who recruit biobank participants, regulators and NHS managers about the integration of a biobank into an NHS hospital. We show that medical waste collected for biomedical research acquires its socio-ethical and economic value from the level of integration (both technologically and organisationally) of the biobank into the NHS hospital. There is extensive investment in a range of intellectual and commercial relationships and labour among stakeholders involved in the production of biospecimens. It is not only the boundaries of research, clinical care and commercialisation of biospecimens that blur but also those of volunteerism and citizenship. Hospital-led biobanks provide an opportunity to study the intertwining of biomedical innovation and healthcare

Passionate Shakespeare

This essay argues that the traditional (and not just Romantic) association of Shakespeare with nature and passion ties his work to a non-doctrinaire politics and morals. As ‘the poet of nature’, in Dr Johnson’s phrase, Shakespeare is linked to an anti-systematic, open, essentially tolerant worldview. The essay brings this point into sharper focus by recounting how one of the poet’s strangest and most ardent admirers, the twentieth-century French-Rumanian writer E.M. Cioran, understood Shakespeare as an artist fundamentally hostile to philosophy and even to reason itself. For Cioran, Shakespeare, along with kindred authors such as Dostoievsky and Nietzsche, exploded systems and the pretensions of thought. It was Shakespeare’s commitment to the passions and experience, his basic irrationalism, that made his work such a powerful antidote to the murderous and programmatic utopianism that, Cioran believed, had blighted so much of human existence, not least in the twentieth century