Neoliberalism, biopolitics and community: The confl ict over governance of umbilical cord stem cells in Argentina

Abstract

Cells therapies and regenerative medicine, together with other emergent technologies coming from biotechnology and nanotechnology fi eld, constitute one of research lines promoted in Argentine in these years. Nevertheless, this priority hasn’t been supported by a previous defi nition of a regulatory program. Even without this program, diff erent social actors (private bio-banks, families, researchers, judges, philosophers), including State, advanced in the developing of practices with steam cells (therapeutic, commercial, experimental practices) and in the formulation of recommendations, opinions, norms. Th e regime for the government of umbilical cordon’s steam cells is in process of construction, subject to an “inventiveness” characterized by the juxtaposition of diff erent interests, rationalities, vocabularies. Th e hypothesis that we support is that bioethics, principles and norms that fi nally conduct practices with steam cells, don’t come from moral philosophers and jurist’s deliberations, but it is inventing in eff ective uses and those imagined by families, researchers, investors, and so on. Th is inventiveness is not developed in a pacifi c but in a controversial way. Starting with the analysis of a corpus of discourses produced by fi ve diff erent statement positions-families, private bio-banks, argentine researchers, state authorities and judges- in this article characterize the confl ict between refl ections, vocabularies, interests, technologies and bio- -ethics, that are at centre of debate related to therapeutic uses of steam cells from umbilical cord.