World without Cats (36 page)

Noah came over, sat beside her, and took her hand in his. “Look, it’s quite possible that some of the cats didn’t get all of the genes in the bullet. Don’t overlook the fact that a large number of cats that acquired all the genes are still running around, while those that did not are all dead.”

“But … well, yeah, that’s true.”

At the CDC, Angelo barged into Bronkowski’s office. “I have a thought,” he proclaimed.

Bronkowski glared at Angelo. “Oh yeah? What is it now?”

“I think we should sponsor an international conference on FHF.”

The director regarded his star epidemiologist. Angelo tried not to smile as Bronkowski’s expression evolved from a scowl to neutral, and then to a nod.

Finally, Bronkowski spoke. “Say, that’s not a bad idea. We could have different sessions for the molecular biology, epidemiology, pathology …”

Angelo had expected an argument. For once he and his boss were in agreement at the outset. “I was thinking mid-September, perhaps the thirteenth and fourteenth.”

“Sounds good. I don’t think we’ve got anything else going on at that time. Whom would you invite?”

“I’ll have to think about it. Certainly the groups in Paris and Moscow … and Chamberlin and his wife. I can make a list.”

Vera and Noah arrived in Atlanta on the twelfth of September and took a cab to the CDC. There they met Angelo, and, as Vera had never been to the campus, he gave them a guided tour. Later that day, Angelo drove Vera and Noah to his home. They would stay with the Kraakmos for the three days of the conference.

Dorothy heard their approach and opened the door. The two women hugged. “Oh, it’s so good to see you again,” Dorothy gushed. “Come in. Come in. Oh, Noah. I wish I understood more about how your bullet thing works. All I know is that it seems to have the ability to protect cats from the virus.”

Noah, rather self-consciously, gave her a hug. “Yes, it looks that way. It’s still too soon to declare victory. We’ll know for sure in another six months.”

Dorothy showed them to the guest bedroom. “You can leave your bags here. Angelo, dear, how about fixing our guests a drink.”

“Absolut! What can I get for you, Vera?”

“Scotch over ice if you have it.”

Noah said, “Do you have any of that Danish beer I drank on my last trip?”

“Yes. There’s a deli not far from here that stocks it.” After he filled a stein for Noah, he said, “Too bad all that work came to nothing.”

“Yeah. That’s for sure. If I had only had this RNA interference idea first, we could have saved a lot of time …”

“And a lot of cats,” Vera interjected.

When they had settled in the living room, Vera noticed the two kittens playing with a cloth ball in a corner.

“Oh my goodness, I had forgotten that you had taken two of the CDC cats. What are their names?”

“The little girl cat is Nora, the little boy is Torvald,” Dorothy replied.

“Those names sound familiar,” Vera observed.

“They’re the names of the main characters in the Ibsen play,
A Doll’s House
,” Angelo replied.

“Right. I remember now.” She walked over to the kittens. “It’s something of a pleasant shock to go into someone’s house and find kittens playing. It’s been a while. In time, I guess the novelty will wear off.”

“We can only hope,” offered Noah.

Dorothy set out a plate of sliced veggies and a dip. “You two have become world famous,” Dorothy remarked. “I see your names in the paper all the time.”

“If the experimental cats start dying, that fame will turn to notoriety,” said Noah.

“Don’t be so pessimistic,” scolded Vera.

Noah shrugged. “Sorry. Just being realistic.”

Vera had been apprehensive when Angelo asked her to open the conference, but she’d gamely agreed. She spent hours preparing a thirty-minute lecture on the history, pathology, and epidemiology of FHF. By Thursday afternoon, the invitees, eighty-seven in all, began arriving. After Angelo’s glowing introduction, and short speech in which he referred to the veterinarian as the “savior of the species
Felis catus
, Vera bounded up to the microphone. As she did so, the assembled scientists began applauding and rising. Vera stood on the podium in shock. She spied Noah, a wide grin on his face, clapping with the others, and she gave him a slight nod. The standing ovation went on for two minutes before Vera motioned for the group to be seated. It took her another minute to regain her composure.

“Thank you so much,” she began. “I … I don’t deserve all that. There are many, many people involved in this project—many of you, in fact—and I am happy to have played a part.” She went on to deliver her prepared speech, detailing Angelo’s role in determining the origin of FHF, the early failed attempts at growing the virus in cell culture, and the failures of the immunization trials. She ended with a brief description of the bullet and of the search for unexposed feral cats.

Bronkowski had decided that only three separate sessions were needed—one dealing with the epidemiology of FHF, another devoted to its molecular biology, and the third for FHF pathology. After the opening speeches, the scientists, veterinarians, and molecular biologists split into three groups, where most of the knowledge-sharing occurred.

Noah chaired the session on molecular biology of FHF. It was the most crowded of the three. When he entered the room, the forty or so scientists gave Noah a standing ovation. Noah nodded to Nicky Brown, who applauded with the others. Brown returned the nod. Noah reflected,
Three years … has it really been three years since my futile trip to the CDC?

“Thank you. Thank you,” said Noah. “Please understand that my colleague, Gary McKeever, was equally responsible for the FHF-FeLV construct. Stand up, Gary.” He stood hesitantly, his face flushed. He too received standing applause.

Noah described the construction of the FeLV vector and his choice of FHF genes. Angelo’s friend André Fidèle reported on a simplified technique for manufacturing the vector, a procedure that cut hours off the time needed for the process. Other papers were primarily speculative and covered such arcana as a fourteen-amino-acid sequence in the Ebola region of the genome that the author believed was involved with the notorious hemorrhagic aspect of the virus. Another report described a matching sequence of the FIV and Ebola genomes that might have allowed them to recombine. One researcher proposed a hypothetical explanation for the attachment of the Ebola-like filaments to the spherical portion of the virus.

Most of the attendees at the pathology session were veterinarians. All had observed the same pattern—rapid onset, loss of muscular function, hemorrhage, and quick death.

The session on epidemiology was the most sparsely attended. Angelo described his discovery of the Seattle connection. Scientists from Europe, Asia, and South America described transmission patterns of FHF in their respective regions of the globe. One German epidemiologist provided a detailed statistical summary of FHF in the new generation of cats carrying the bullet, and of the control group that had not incorporated the vector. As all knew, every cat lacking the bullet had succumbed to the virus. However, about 15 percent of cats that had the FHF-FeLV genes incorporated, nine cats in all, also died. There was considerable speculation as to why that might be. It was generally assumed that those cats failed to incorporate some essential part of the vector. The upside, of course, was that 85 percent of the new kittens were apparently completely free of susceptibility to FHF.

The conference was a huge success. Months later, after the papers had been published in a slim volume, the first printing sold out within a week. The publisher went through seven before demand ebbed.

A few days later, back in Camarillo, Noah was going over a draft of a paper he was co-authoring with Gary for
The Journal of Molecular Biology
on the FHF-FeLV vector when Gary appeared in the office doorway.

“Hey, Doc, got a minute?”

“Sure, come on in. I’m going over our paper. Looks like it’s about ready to send off.”

“Yeah. I think so too,” replied the young man. “The graph in the second figure may need reworking.” The two men discussed the details of the figure. Gary then said, “Say, Doc, I want to thank you for acknowledging my assistance with the bullet at the conference the other day. You called me your colleague. That really got to me. I’ve always thought of myself as your student.”

Two years after the first bullet-carrying kittens were born, 348 domestic cats were known to be alive worldwide. All of these carried the bullet genes. Very few cats from the first bullet litters had died from FHF.

The National Zoo in Washington had set up an intensive breeding program at their Front Royal campus in Virginia. Zoo personnel acquired three male cats and four females from the CDC, two males and a female from the French group, and a single female from the Russians.

In the heart of California’s Mojave Desert, at a town named Rosamond, the Exotic Feline Breeding Compound had been established in 1977 to propagate, and thereby preserve, endangered cat species. There, one could find tigers, jaguars, ocelots, and a variety of other species. The common house cat was not one of their priorities—until now, when the species was close to extinction. After the bullet cats were released to the public, the EFBC acquired three males and three females and began a breeding program for
Felis catus.
Visitors, who were formerly attracted to the more exotic cats were now enthralled once again to have even brief contact with their onetime companion animal. The EFBC allowed children to pet them in a fenced-in enclosure. Many adults, who formerly kept a cat or two, were as eager as the children to approach and handle the felines.

The old Torre Argentina cat sanctuary in Rome was reopened as a breeding center and cat hospital. Similar programs were initiated at the Moscow Zoo, the Zoo de Vincennes in Paris, and the Shanghai Zoo.

Even the Melbourne Zoo began a breeding effort, ironic, considering the love/hate relationship the Australians previously had regarding domestic cats. In an odd turn of events, the head keeper of the Seattle Zoo decided that it would be a great public relations coup if it started breeding domestic cats. Their reputation had been unjustly besmirched by the fact that FHF had originated there.

Many of these programs were funded, wholly or in part, by donations from Feline Phoenix, which now served as the clearinghouse for all donations for the preservation of
Felis catus.
Although Vera’s organization had paid out over seven million dollars in aid, it was still receiving donations from animal lovers. She had finally rented an office in Camarillo, hired three paid personnel, and appointed a board of directors, consisting of veterinarians and individuals from animal-welfare groups.

At Adolfo Camarillo High School, in the very city where Vera and Noah had brought about their miracle, Roberto Ruiz, a biology teacher, phoned his friend and fellow biologist, Booker T. Wilson, at Jordan High located in the South-Central area of Los Angeles. They exchanged small talk for a minute or two. Finally, Wilson asked, “So, Roberto, to what do I owe this call? You didn’t phone me just to talk about the Dodgers.”

Ruiz laughed. “No, no, Book. I wanted to discuss something with you. I have a crazy idea.”

“You always had crazy ideas back in the day. So what else is new?”

“This one might have legs. You know that there’s a huge movement to get people to breed cats, right?”

“Yeah. In fact, the cat thing and FHF have been a popular discussion topic in my biology classes for several years now. Even the inner-city kids at Jordan are into it. It’s given me a great lead-in to population dynamics, ecology, disease, and a bunch of other subjects.”

“Precisely,” replied Ruiz. “Here’s my idea. You and I, we apply for a grant from the National Science Foundation. The idea is that we acquire a couple of breeding pairs of cats for both our schools. We include a request for funds to build large enclosures on the school grounds. Then we let the students tend the cats, keep careful records of their health, growth rates, that sort of thing.” He was speaking rapidly, now. “When kittens are born, the students record their phenotypes—hair color, size, sex, all the usual stuff. That way, we tie in basic genetics.”

“And when the semester ends, then what?”

“Well, that’s the beauty of it. The project gets passed on to the next class. This goes on for several years. When there’s a surplus of cats, we give them away.”

“Sounds good, but why do you need me? Why don’t you just apply for the grant on your own?”

“Well, my friend, you already said it. I think the grant application might have more of a hook if it involved ‘inner-city kids’ as you call them.”

“Aahh. I see. Yes, I see your point.” He was silent a moment. “Let’s do it!”

Four months later, their grant made headlines when the NSF awarded the two schools $50,000 each toward student-run cat-breeding programs. Within months, schools across the country, and then across the world, had adopted such programs.

Another year passed. The nine bullet cats that had died of FHF proved to be the exception. All the other bullet-carrying cats were completely resistant to the virus. The Cat Preservation Coalition was now sponsoring public service spots on television and radio encouraging families to adopt breeding pairs of cats.

Vera noticed one of these while watching the evening news. “Look at that, Noah,” she remarked. “A few years back, those animal groups were advocating that people have their cats spayed or neutered. Now they’re saying let ’em have babies.”

“I think it won’t be long before they go back to their earlier position. I read that there are now an estimated two thousand cats on Earth.”

“I saw that article. That’s from just sixty-seven kittens in the first litters.”

“No, it was eighty-seven,” countered Noah. “I remember that number.” Vera grinned. Noah knotted his brow. “What? … Oh. Right. Twenty of those didn’t get the bullet. You got me.”