When genomics meets geopolitics

This does not mean that international research has moved neatly from an earlier period of frictionless openness into a new era of national fragmentation. Rather, a renegotiation is unfolding in the governance of global scientific collaboration. Social science studies of genomics and biobanking have long shown that collaboration is shaped not only by ideals of openness, but also by institutional interests, ownership claims over samples and data, public trust, benefit-sharing disputes, and forms of “data hugging” (Tupasela, 2021 ). These long-standing tensions are especially visible in the life sciences, where genomic data is simultaneously treated as a public good, a biomedical resource, a commercial asset, and an object of national or community concern. What is changing, therefore, is not the sudden arrival of sovereignty in genomics, but the growing visibility and institutional significance of questions around data residency, infrastructural capacity, legal jurisdiction, and trust-building in cross-border scientific collaboration. The argument is therefore not that genomic research has uniformly shifted from openness to closure. Rather, it concerns the changing governance conditions, strategic framings, and institutional justifications through which genomic collaboration is organized and legitimated.