The systematic storing of human biological samples in biobanks has increased worldwide. This increasing in sample collection activities supports the development of medical research. However which directions are these collections following? Sociology has argued that social concerns with human life, health and illness have changed greatly trough time and space, shaping medicine and science in general. In a biobank, there is a set of professionals who interact and develop their practices, which structures complex representations of science and technology, medicine, body, health and illness. Besides, concepts of what and how human beings should be are also embedded. The laboratory procedures scrutinize samples under advanced technologies, to remove the impurity and danger of sample’s manipulation, promoting surgical waste into objects of science and health innovation. Sample features are determined under submission to codification and organisation systems, obeying to clinical research criteria, which are conditioned by social, moral and political norms. These criteria could vary from place to place, and trough time. Grounded in a health sociology perspective, the aim is to explore how the collection and storage of human biological samples is generating novel ways to interpret and define body boundaries, new configurations of health and illness, and the design of sophisticated politics of life. The dimensions of health are connected in social, political and cultural structures and its biological dimension cannot be thought without the recognition of this complex and multidimensional scope.

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Enhancement, biobanks, politics of life, sociology