Cat on the Cutting Edge

In full scrubs and armed with a scalpel, Clare Gregory hovers over an anesthetized light-brown tabby named Wink. He cuts through the vessels connecting the cat's kidney to its circulatory system and drops the walnut-sized organ in a dish of ice. A nurse sets the hands of a large timer on the wall of the operating room, which begins the countdown from 60 minutes. That's the amount of time the vets have to connect Wink's kidney inside Binky, a very sick kitty, whose own kidneys have failed.


Joe Toreno
Forget lab rats: Household pets are being used to refine advanced cloning and surgical techniques, and to pinpoint our DNA trouble spots.
In the operating room, the two cats are tied down on adjacent tables, paws taped back in spread-eagle fashion. Breathing tubes are stuck down their throats, and drip tubes deliver anesthesia through veins in their wrists. Their tongues hang out of their mouths, and their eyes are open and glassy. They seem dead except for their opened chests, which move up and down in a slow rhythm controlled by expensive machinery. They look nearly identical.

In fact, though, they're quite different. With Binky's kidneys failing, his blood chemistry has gone haywire. At 11 years old, he's highly anemic and unable to flush his own blood of nitrogen, urea, and other respiration by-products. His emaciated and shaved body looks more like a skinned rabbit than a cat that once weighed a hefty 14 pounds - he's now shrunk to 8. Wink, on the other hand, is downright porky. Just 2 years old, he's spent his entire life as a research animal in a nutrition study at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, where he did nothing but eat and sleep. Now he's been selected to donate an organ. The deal is that in exchange for one kidney, the recipient's owner must adopt donor pet Wink, liberating him from the lab. So to save one cat, you get two.

Now, sitting over Binky's draped body, Gregory and fellow surgeon Lynda Bernsteen peer into the patient's abdominal cavity through a giant microscope built for two. Gregory asks that no one bump the table as he begins cutting into the aorta and vena cava to plug in the new organ. "Time?" Bernsteen asks between careful incisions and minute sutures. She moves so quickly it almost looks easy. A quick cut here, an expert stitch there. The doctors work the miracle of modern surgery, and it's hard to remember that the patient is a cat. After what seems like only moments, a nurse reports that 32 minutes have passed. That leaves only 28 to finish.

All this energy to save poor Binky might seem a gross indulgence. But Binky's owner, Gayle Roberts, a vet herself, would willingly part with one of her own kidneys for any member of her family. That clan - in addition to Binky, a husband, and two kids - includes Blackjack, Bedbug, Dark Crystal, Penelope, Helen, Kiwi, and Lucifer. It's hard to remember who is who. Is Dusty her son or the Australian shepherd? Although Binky's kidney transplant will set Roberts back $9,000 for surgery, drugs, and post-op care (for canines, the cost runs upwards of 15 grand), when it's close kin, it's hard to say no. Forced to choose between Binky and mortgage payments, Roberts chose her cat. Since then, her bank has threatened to foreclose on the house.

One hundred years ago, Americans considered cats little more than rat catchers and gave even beloved dogs almost no medical treatment. But as the the middle class grew wealthy enough to include animals in their families, and as the automobile displaced the horse in the early 20th century, urban veterinarians began looking for new markets. They gradually found work spaying, neutering, and fixing the broken bones of a growing population of household pets: cats and dogs. The growth proved contagious. In 1950, there were roughly 9,000 members of the American Veterinary Medical Association; that figure is now 70,000.

As pet owners pour more and more money into advanced treatments, it's not just the Binkys who are benefiting. Animal medical procedures are pushing vets into the most experimental regions of science. Demand for sophisticated pet care has brought terms like gene therapy and MRI into the vet lexicon. Surgeons at UC Davis now complete 25 kidney transplants a year and are trying out experimental drugs on pets with terminal brain tumors. At Iowa State, dogs are getting artificial elbows, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, vets are saving damaged limbs by implanting the bones of dead animals. Over the years, the passion of pet owners has created a discipline poised to inform medicine as a whole.

"Our pets have this huge veterinary profession scrutinizing them, with thousands of observers of disease graduating from veterinary schools each year," says Stephen O'Brien, chief scientific officer at the National Cancer Institute's Laboratory of Genomic Diversity.

All this data provides a window into human medicine that researchers otherwise wouldn't have. For starters, vet science gathers information that policy or mores make inaccessible in human science. Advanced cloning technologies, for instance, have allowed vets to begin using embryonic stem cells in ways that are against the law in human medicine.

Then there's the quality that drew humans to these animals in the first place - their emotional dimension. Drugs and other therapies affect moods in cats and dogs much as they do in humans. "The dog can look at you, and you can see if he's anxious or uncomfortable," says Stanford medical researcher Emmanuel Mignot. "You can see the side effect of a drug immediately. You can't see that in a mouse."

But a happy patient's wagging tail reveals only a fraction of what pets' congenital health problems can teach medicine in general. In our carefully propagated companions, there's a huge reservoir of diseases and mutations that result from efforts to breed the most skin folds in a shar-pei, the best eye color in a Siamese, perfect contours in a boxer, and herding qualities in a border collie. Generations of refinements have created extremely inbred populations, much more distinct than any found in the human species. Which means: Doberman pinschers get heart disease, schnauzers develop cataracts, and English bulldogs suffer from sleep apnea. By linking mutations in pets to their breed-specific ailments, scientists can find out which genes are active in certain disorders and apply that knowledge to the human model. Animals also share many of humanity's more common ills: Cats suffer from diabetes, hemophilia, retinal degeneration, and more than 250 other human diseases. Veterinary medicine has been cataloging these ailments for decades, creating a massive library of data that's applicable to people.