Combating the “Silent Crisis” of the Donation Gap with “Polyphonic Relatedness”

The UK has been a global leader in the development and regulation of biobanks and bio-databases that facilitate clinical and laboratory access to tissue, blood samples, DNA and data. Yet the persistent barrier to mobilise non- White communities into actively contributing to and, subsequently benefiting from structural and scientific advantages that the UK can offer constitutes a ‘Silent Crisis’. This paper builds on ongoing research on stem cell donations carried out by the authors in the UK. We underline the centrality of the concept of ‘relatedness’ in donor recruitment, and the tricky role it has played, both as a uniting and an alienating force within and between different ethnic communities. We argue that the building of a thick societal relatedness or what we term as ‘polyphonic relatedness’ offers a constructive guidance to overcome the racial disparity in biomaterial donations.