I am all about biobanks now. A biobank is a type of biorepository which stores human biological specimens long-term for future research. I have been having encounters with biobanks for years and always had questions about them, and I have even had some conflicts with researchers on this topic. Recently I met someone who develops biobank policy, and we started talking about Wikipedia, and I began connecting a lot of things I have done in the past to the problems she told me she is having. After this, I began reading everything I can about biobanks and I am trying to sort out all the related issues.
Biobanks pose some new issues in clinical research which have not been addressed and settled with anything approaching broad consensus. The problems are vast, mostly non-scientific, intimately related with online communication, and specifically affect me and people around me now.
This started at an NWABR meeting. NWABR is the Northwest Association of Biomedical Researchers. They are a network of organizations which helps biotech organizations coordinate their work in this region, and specifically they do a lot to promote outreach and education. The situation is that most biotech organizations do not need a full outreach department, so everyone can dip into a common pool and share educational resources. NWABR particularly works to make sure that people appreciate biotech work done in this area.
Ro from HVTN sent out a notice suggesting that we go, so I went and met lots of interesting people and loved it. In the next meeting I met this woman named Kelly Edwards and everything she said about research ethics was things that I wanted to learn to say. We met up later and talked about the biobank entry on Wikipedia, then she looped me in with some other people.
We came up with this plan for me to add some introductory content on the biobank entry and related articles, they will give that expert review, then I see if I can attract more community attention. This thrills me because this is exactly the kind of collaboration I have in mind for many areas of scientific research, and especially those fields which depend on community collaboration.
I wonder how this will go?