Making bio-objects mobile: behind the scenes of a translational stem cell banking consortium

The concept of bio-objectification describes how the ‘raw materials’ of living cells and tissues are subject to both technical manipulations and ontological transformations to produce novel ‘bio-objects’ such as cell lines and transgenic animals. Bio-objects are conceptually fluid, but also subject to literal circulation through biobanks and repositories. Making bio-objects mobile means producing them in such a way that they are capable of travelling across jurisdictions, institutional boundaries, and of moving between public and private sectors. This paper uses one particular bio-object—the human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC), and a particular context, a European consortium dedicated to creating an open access repository of hiPSC—to explore what making mobilisable bio-objects entails. The bio-object not only has multiple strands of identity—legal, ethical, political, technical—but this identity is distributed across, and inscribed in, a variety of paper documents, digital records, as well as the biological material. Making bio-objects mobile means putting these heterogeneous components into circulation, which can entail travel through different infrastructures and at different speeds. Moreover, contemporary legal and ethical requirements for the use of human biomaterials require the formation of durable connections that tie bio-objects to places and persons of origin as a condition of mobility