"We Cannot Lock Research Up”: Balancing Health and Wealth through Bioconstitutional Orderings in Belgium

As a resource that has been in increasing demand for decades, human tissues and cells arenow recognized as an important source of both health and wealth. As such, public authorities have taken responsibility for regulating their procurement, storage, manipulation and use. This article examines how this regulation works in practice by examining the case of Belgium, a country where the pharmaceutical industry weighs heavily in terms of employment and economic growth. Looking at the interactions between law and life through the analytical lens of ‘bioconstitutionalism’, we specifically ask how the extraction of human bodily material (HBM) is regulated and we explore the changing relationships between citizens, public authorities, and researchers as a result. The Belgian bioconstitutional order tends to encourage research by facilitating the availability and use of HBM, in the hope that this will fuel the engine of innovation and thus employment and economic growth. This is done at the expense of protecting both the donor (through relaxed consent requirements) and the patient (by prioritizing resources to regulate, control and promote biomedical research rather than therapeutic applications of HBM). We then discuss the implications of these findings for the broader moral and political economy of health regulation. In particular, we argue that what it
means to be ‘altruistic’ is being reshaped within a new moral economy of giving, without a clear recognition of this reshaping, which includes citizens as crucial contributors to the further development of the bioeconomy, while at the same time excluding them from participating in the governance of how this bioeconomy develops.