Biobanks, collecting human specimen, medical records, and lifestyle-related data, face the challenge of having contradictory missions: on the one hand serving the collective welfare through easy access for medical research, on the other hand adhering to restrictive privacy expectations of people in order to maintain their willingness to participate in such research. In this article, ethical frameworks stressing the societal value of low-privacy expectations in order to secure biomedical research are discussed. It will turn out that neither utilitarian nor communitarian or classical libertarian ethics frameworks will help to serve both goals. Instead, John Rawls’ differentiation of the “right” and the “good” is presented in order to illustrate the possibility of “serving two masters”: individual interests of privacy, and societal interests of scientific progress and intergenerational justice. In order to illustrate this counterbalancing concept with an example, the five-pillar concept of the German Ethics Council will be briefly discussed.

The notions ‘common good’ and ‘public good’ are mostly used as synonyms in bioethical discussion of biobanks, but have different origins. As a consequence, they should be applied differently. In this article, the respective characteristics are worked out and then subsequently examined which consent models emerge from them. Distinguishing normative and descriptive traits of both concepts, it turns out that one concept is unjustly used, and that the other one fits better to the context of a plural society. A reflected use of these differing concepts may help to choose an appropriate form of consent and allows public trust in biobank research to deepen.

During the past decades, research on ethical, legal, and social aspects (ELSA) of biobanks suggested and analysed various ethically and socially justifiable frameworks for collecting, storing, and distributing human biological material and bioinformation. In this article, we identify three patterns of argument that differ in terms of shared core assumptions and similar conceptual as well as normative orientations. These discursive 'orders', which are related to specific macropolitical contexts, have significantly shaped contexts for biobank policymaking. The first order was characterised by high expectations of genomics and biobanking. Second order discourse partly took over the problems located in the first order, but reintroduced them into a justificatory framework that identified biobanks as public goods per se. The third order of ELSA expertise maintained a supportive attitude towards biobanking. However, regulation based on deductive reasoning became progressively complemented by ideals of participatory mechanisms and different methodologies of studying public perceptions. We conclude that this emphasis on learning processes and deliberation helps biobank communities to develop new concepts, methods and insights that will prove helpful in order to adapt to essentially undetermined futures of transnational innovation societies. IntroductionThe role of ethics in policy discourses about biotechnological innovation has already received a reasonable amount of attention.