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When we have blood drawn or tissue biopsied, where do the leftovers go? A surprising amount of them don’t get discarded, but instead wind up in vast repositories known as biobanks, to be used for research. Artist and biohacker Heather Dewey-Hagborg sought to reclaim her cellular sovereignty by tracking the fate of her samples. The result is her installation, Is a Biobank a Home?
There, visitors encounter fluorescent-lit shelves packed with “blood”-filled vials. From speakers, recordings of Dewey-Hagborg’s requests for information about her own samples from various medical institutions—including the hospital where she was born—are mashed with crashing percussion to create Correspondence Song.
Viewers must squeeze through the walls of blood, arranged in a claustrophobic spiral, until they reach the window. Here, a stained-glass piece glints in the sunlight: Self-Portrait (Pathology). Upon closer inspection, one notices the collage contains faint purple splotches—slides of Dewey-Hagborg’s biopsied tissue that she was able to obtain.
In recent decades, scientists and biotechnology companies have begun reckoning with the injustices illuminated by the case of Henrietta Lacks—a cervical cancer patient at Johns Hopkins Hospital whose family wasn’t informed for decades that her cells were widely disseminated within the medical community, earning companies billions of dollars. This shift inspired a proposed change to the rule that protects human subjects in federally funded research: requiring written consent from sample donors for future use in medical research.
But in 2017, this proposal was abandoned by federal officials after lobbying from biomedical and university research groups, who claimed that it would come with major costs, logistical hurdles, and potential privacy risks for donors. More recently, the rise (and fall) of at-home DNA testing kits has introduced another consent conundrum: What will happen to the genetic information from more than 15 million 23andMe users after the company is sold off to the highest bidder?
While it’s easy to forget the pieces of us that are quickly swabbed, snipped, or drawn into a vial, either in a hospital or our own living room, Is a Biobank a Home? reminds us that we live on in these fragments locked away in storage—and all these bits of us deserve a reunion.
Is a Biobank a Home? is on view at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum through August 10. 
Lead photo by Ann Sunwoo / Smithsonian Institution
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