ABSTRACT
Biobanking sits at the intersection of many research disciplines and involves heterogeneous types of actors including legislators, policy-makers, research participants, researchers and funders. This chapter provides an overview of biobanking, commencing with an introduction to the nomenclature of the field. It presents some key epistemological issues and discusses the related ethical issues raised, that is, privacy, security, ownership of data and informed consent. The epistemological issues of big data can be divided into two groups: issues related to a presumptive 'objectivity' of the data, and issues related to the context of the data. The heterogeneity raises many challenges for ethics and governance since a one-size-fits-all approach to biobanks may be insensitive to the specific needs of particular biobanks and their participants. The chapter utilizes the Athlome Consortium as the largest current example of collaborative sports genetic biobanking and also discusses the tensions between individual rights and public benefits of genomic research as a critical ethical issue as in sports genomics.
