The Emergence of an Entitlement Framework for Stored Tissue - Elements and Implications of an Escalating Conflict in Sweden

In 1999, a biotech company was established in Västerbotten County, in Sweden, and
given what was termed ‘all commercial rights’ to a major research biobank containing
blood samples of the majority of the adult population. It was predicted that the
company would place the otherwise rather marginalised community at the centre
of international life-science research. International investments failed to appear, however.
During the spring of 2002, internal disagreements concerning dispositional
rights in the biobank resulted in court appeals, critical newspaper articles and, more
informally, mutual threats among parties with different interests in the biobank material.
In this article, it is argued that scrutiny of this conflict provides a chance to
understand the emergence of delineated entitlements in material contained in Swedish
biobanks.

Keywords: property relations, social entitlements, genetic databases