Projecting and producing ‘usefulness’ of biomedical research infrastructures; or why the Singapore Tissue Network closed

This article investigates why the Singapore Tissue Network (STN) was closed, despite the government’s continued interest in the economic potential of biomedical research, to which this repository had been expected to contribute. This article engages with the STN as a research infrastructure that was designed to serve Singapore’s sociotechnical imaginary of economic development based on technological advancement, but did not align with practitioners’ views of how tissue storage contributes to knowledge making. By exploring tensions around the collection of tissue, exchange, and value in the STN, this article proposes that projections of usefulness onto the collected materials conflicted with practitioners’ perspective on the production of usefulness through engagement with these materials. This discrepancy points to the tensions between imaginaries of the purposes of tissue collection in research practice and science policy, raising the question how different perspectives on how to make research infrastructures useful may be aligned.