An Insufferable Business: Ethics, Nonhuman Animals and Biomedical Experiments

Posthuman Affirmative Business Ethics: Reimagining Human-Animal Relations Through Speculative Fiction

Posthuman affirmative ethics relies upon a fluid, nomadic conception of the ethical subject who develops affective, material and immaterial connections to multiple others. Our purpose in this paper is to consider what posthuman affirmative business ethics would look like, and to reflect on the shift in thinking and practice this would involve. The need for a revised understanding of human-animal relations in business ethics is amplified by crises such as climate change and pandemics that are related to ecologically destructive business practices such as factory farming. In this analysis, we use feminist speculative fiction as a resource for reimagination and posthuman ethical thinking. By focusing on three ethical movements experienced by a central character named Toby in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, we show how she is continually becoming through affective, embodied encounters with human and nonhuman others. In the discussion, we consider the vulnerability that arises from openness to affect which engenders heightened response-ability to and with, rather than for, multiple others. This expanded concept of subjectivity enables a more relational understanding of equality that is urgently needed in order to respond affirmatively to posthuman futures.

Mouse-to-mouse variation in maturation heterogeneity of smooth muscle cells

Smooth muscle cell (SMC) heterogeneity plays an important role in vascular remodeling, a life-threatening hallmark of many vascular diseases. However, the characterization of SMCs at the single-cell level is stymied by drawbacks of contemporary single-cell protein measurements, including antibody probe cross-reactivity, chemical fixation artifacts, limited isoform-specific probes, low multiplexing and difficulty sampling cells with irregular morphologies. To scrutinize healthy vessels for subpopulations of SMCs with proliferative-like phenotypes, we developed a high-specificity, multiplexed single-cell immunoblotting cytometry tool for unfixed, uncultured primary cells. We applied our assay to demonstrate maturation stage profiling of aortic SMCs freshly isolated from individual mice. After ensuring unbiased sampling of SMCs (80-120 μm in length), we performed single-SMC electrophoretic protein separations, which resolve protein signal from off-target antibody binding, and immunoblotted for differentiation markers α-SMA, CNN-1 and SMMHC (targets ranging from 34 kDa to 227 kDa). We identified a subpopulation of immature-like SMCs, supporting the recently-established mechanism that only a subset of SMCs is responsible for vascular remodeling. Furthermore, the low sample requirements of our assay enable single-mouse resolution studies, which minimizes animal sacrifice and experimental costs while reporting animal-to-animal phenotypic variation, essential for achieving reproducibility and surmounting the drawbacks of pooling primary cells from different animals.