Cryovalues beyond High Expectations

Endurance and the Construction of Value in Cord Blood Banking

Bibliographic Data

ID5415516
AuthorsRuzana Liburkina (0000-0003-0994-3606, Institute of Sociology, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume48
Issue4
Pages777-804
Publication date2023-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueScience Technology & Human Values (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0162-2439 • E-ISSN: 1552-8251
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/01622439221108229
OpenAlexW4283708213
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited52

Cryopreservation attracts attention as a practice grounded in high expectations: current life is suspended for future use-to generate life, to save life, and to resurrect life. But what happens when high expectations in cryobanking give way to looming uselessness and the risk of failure? Based on ethnographic insights into the case of umbilical cord blood (CB) banking in Germany, this contribution investigates the liminal state of "non-failure." Averting failure amid a lack of success in this field requires putting effort into the construction of value. The resulting practices and dynamics overflow generic stories of commercialization and instrumentalization of biological material and are best grasped as an expanded version of the recently coined notion of "cryovalue." The long-term availability of cryopreserved CB facilitates the steady yield of social and economic capital beyond and after promise. Moreover, the value construction is reoriented from CB itself toward the sociotechnical cryo-arrangements in which it is embedded. In exemplifying how it expands the understanding of the diversity of valuation and valorization practices, continuities, and economic endurance in cryoeconomies and bioeconomies, the paper advocates the study of their ambivalent and allegedly uneventful sites

Ambivalence · Business · Commercialization · Economics · Liminality · Management · Sociology · Sociotechnical system · Bioeconomy and Sustainability Development · Biomedical Ethics and Regulation · Computer Science · Pluripotent Stem Cells Research · Psychology · Social Psychology · Finance · Marketing

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