Going with the Flow: Moving Cells and Changing Values in Biomedical Practice

Science and technology studies have devoted considerable attention to the economic
implications of biomedical technoscience. This article enriches these studies by offering an original conceptual framework that highlights the porous boundaries between gift, commodity, and asset economies. We derive this framework from an empirical analysis of autologous blood donation in the case of a cell therapy called ‘extracorporeal photopheresis’. Combining a year-long ethnography with semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and document analysis in a cell therapy laboratory at a Belgian university hospital, we followed cells in motion from their original donation to their reinjection into the body, observing the practices that constitute and shape their value. We find that the various qualifications as ‘gift’, ‘commodity’ or ‘asset’ that cells acquire, accumulate, or relinquish, as well as the consequences of these qualifications, are only accessible by observing the valuation practices that configure living processes. Our analysis of these practices highlights the interrelations between the economic forms that living entities can take to reject the idea of a watertight boundary between them. By emphasizing the entanglement of logics specific to donation, commodification, or assetization, this article
contributes to linking the value shifts observed at the level of the laboratory to broader capitalist transformations.