In response to an informative article on personalized medicine and biobanking in Nature Biotechnology, a recent letter to the Editor defends broad consent for biobanking.
The three letter writers emphasize the patient and donor perspective:
- “…patient donors actually express concern that study-specific consent can be burdensome and impede research.”
Given these donors’ desire to give so-called broad consent, I want to highlight two problematic aspects of the distinction between specific and broad consent.
The first is that the word “broad” consent may give rise to the impression that the consent is so general and vague that it cannot be seen as informed consent to anything specific at all. But broad consent is not “broad” in such an absolute sense, akin to vagueness. It is “broad” only in a relative sense: in relation to the historically more prevalent case of consenting to individual research projects.
The distinction between specific and broad consent is a distinction between two ways of being specific. One of these ways of being specific dominated the scene first. It therefore functioned as a linguistic standard. The other way of being specific had to put up with being called “broad.”
Specific consent, then, is specific only in a specific sense: one that is historically conditioned and changeable. It is not the golden standard of exactitude. Consent can therefore be “broad” without being vague.
The second problematic aspect is that when people donate samples to biobanks, the exact nature of the individual research projects that might use their samples is less relevant to them than when they consent to invasive procedures in clinical trials.
The risks are minimal in biobank research. Donors therefore look more to the practical utility of the research than to the research itself. Forcing them to consider the purposes and questions and procedures of individual research projects is forcing them to attend to a level of medical research that is less relevant to them as donors.
In short, a historically and linguistically insensitive demand for “specific consent” in biobanking may hinder donors from giving the kind of specific consent they authentically want to give in this new but more and more prevalent context.
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