AUTHOR COPY Original Article US biobanking strategies and biomedical immaterial labor Robert Mitchell Duke University, Box 90015, Durham, NC 27708, USA. E-mail: rmitch@duke.edu Abstract Many commentators seem in agreement that the ‘promise’ of the genomics revolution is to be realized through the creation of large-scale biobanks: that is, collections of human tissue and associated data from populations ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of subjects. Yet obtaining access to such large volumes of biospecimens and data is often difficult, and especially so in the United States. Drawing on published material and interviews with biobank managers conducted between 2006 and 2011, this article provides a tripartite typology of strategies currently employed by US biobanking advocates, distinguishing between de novo, networking and repurposing biobanking strategies. This typology emphasizes the economic aspects of biobanking, and emphasizes as well a conflict between two different understandings of biological citizenship: on the one hand, a mode of biological citizenship that links donation to a form of clinical labor in order to enable access to tissues and health biographies of individuals; on the other, an approach to biovalue that seeks to avoid both clinical labor and biological citizenship in favor of protocols designed to extract biovalue unobtrusively from already existing patterns of health-care and life by means of what I call ‘biomedical immaterial labor’. BioSocieties (2012) 7, 224–244. doi:10.1057/biosoc.2012.9; published online 23 July 2012 Keywords: biobanking; clinical labor; immaterial labor; de novo; networking; repurposing Since the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP) in 2003, geneticists, policy makers and pharmaceutical companies have struggled with the question of how best to realize the ‘promise’ of the genetics and genomics revolutions. That the massive increase in knowledge produced by these revolutions holds some sort of promise for health is apparently a given, even if the precise nature of this promise is generally cast in the generic and utopian terms of ‘personalized medicine’ or ‘the prevention and cure of cancer and other diseases’ (Friede et al, 2003, p. 2). Commentators have instead tended to focus on the question of how this relatively undefined promise of genomics might best be realized. And on this topic, many commentators agree that the key is large-scale biobanks – that is, collections of human tissues and associated clinical (and sometimes lifestyle and environmental) data from populations ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of subjects (Friede et al, 2003, p. 2; Collins, 2004, 2007; Smith et al, 2005; UK Biobank, 2006; Willett, 2007). This approach to medical research represents a movement away from an older one-gene/one-disease model of r 2012 The London School of Economics and Political Science 1745-8552 BioSocieties Vol. 7, 3, 224–244 www.palgrave-journals.com/biosoc/