Taiwan Biobank, Participants’ Public Imaginaries, and Civic Epistemologies

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: SKAT and the State

Abstract

As national biobanks have developed worldwide since 2000, calls for democratic governance have become increasingly evident. However, in East Asia, national biobank governance has mostly relied on top-down approaches. In this paper, we survey and interview participants in Taiwan Biobank (TBB) to explore how publics imagine issues of governance to give voice to the often unheard publics involved in an East Asian biobank. We introduce the concept of “governance through public imaginary” to address how national biobanks operate in alignment with the collective imaginaries shaping public expectations. Our findings reveal that participants accept TBB’s top-down governance due to two key Taiwanese civic epistemologies: first, the belief in elite national scientific institutions as drivers of national progress, and second, the value placed on the rule of law in Taiwan’s democratization. However, concerns about transparency and misuse of data by private companies or foreign governments remain unaddressed in the TBB governance models. To better serve Taiwanese publics, we argue that TBB must fully address Taiwanese imaginaries by implementing locally relevant forms of inclusive democratic governance. This article offers a new approach to understanding how biobanks operate in diverse national contexts and how their governance can better reflect each country’s unique public imaginaries.

Author

• Yu-yueh Tsai, Academia Sinica