ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 looks at the standardisation of biosciences through global digital infrastructures, categories, and methods of representation. The chapter provides background for the idea of a standard biobank language and points out how the dream of a standard biological language has always been one of the aims in the biosciences. Empirically, the chapter analyses the standardisation of the fundamental information model for the first EU-wide research platform, the European Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure (BBMRI-ERIC; work led by the Swedish Karolinska Institutet). In the chapter, we claim that the standardisation of a universal biobank language conceptually transforms also the objects of scientific enquiry – human biobanks (what they are) and the objects they hold (the concepts of ‘donor’, ‘sample’, and related ‘data’) – for purposes of developing an information model that is suitable for large-scale collaboration.
