Introduction
Biobanking is the process of collecting biological data for researches, clinical, and health improvement. Pandya, in her Forbes article, highlights that “medicine and the development of new drugs will play critical roles, so access to biospecimens from biobanks becomes fundamental.” Biobanking is an enormous opportunity for future growth: according to Mill’s philosophy, empiricism, logic, and science are the keys to continuous progress. Nevertheless, as per the analyzed article, biobanking generates ethical issues such as the fact of sharing a private individual’s biological data for the sake of humanity’s future. The purpose of the paper is to discuss the ethical side of biobanking and its appliance for populations, nations, or individuals.
Main body
Pandya’s article describes that there are no actual standards of storage in biobanks, as many nations do not have enough sources to provide for trustworthy usage. Moreover, Ashcroft states that “big data material in a biobank might encroach on privacy and confidentiality and might detrimentally expose information about individuals, families, communities, and populations” (275). Biological data collected from an individual of a developed nation might be appropriately stored and used. In contrast, a person from a developing country might face the problem of his or her data being used or stored unreliably. Both of the individuals shared their biological material for the sake of humanity’s progress in general, yet one of them faces a problem, and this is the ethical issue.
Conclusion
Philosophy ideas tend to state that humanity needs to unite for a better life of people in general, but nowadays, there are many options to consider each individual’s interests. Ethical terms of biobanking need to be reviewed to include standards that cover every world’s nation’s opportunity and policy. Moreover, an ethical code for biobanking with its principles and guarantees might increase the trust and let even more people share their data to improve health and develop the future growth of humanity.
References
Ashcroft, Jonathan W., and Cheryl C. Macpherson. “The Complex Ethical Landscape of Biobanking.” The Lancet Public Health, vol. 4, no. 6, 2019, pp. 274–275.
Pandya, Jayshree. “Biobanking Is Changing The World.” Forbes, 2019, Web.