World without Cats

by Bonham Richards

  It was obvious to Vera that the guy had really thought this through. “That’s great, Larry. Thanks for thinking ahead.”

  By the time they reached the farmhouse, Vera was feeling tense. Am I nervous because of the prospect of failure, she wondered, or of success? As they drove up, Mrs. Wilson emerged from the house and waved. Red-cheeked, chubby, and middle-aged, she reminded Vera of Dottie.

  Protected from the rain by a large awning over the porch, the vets stayed outside, while Parsons explained the procedure to Mrs. Wilson. Vera glanced inside. She saw that the home was spic-and-span. A hooked rug lay over the hardwood floor, and she noticed a well-worn family Bible on the coffee table. A stitched sampler on the wall read, “God Bless our Home.” And there, sleeping by the warm hearth was the cat. God, right out of a Norman Rockwell painting.

  At that moment, wearing a dripping yellow slicker, a John Deere Cap, and smelling faintly of fertilizer and motor oil, Jim Wilson made his appearance. He removed the slicker and laid it over the porch swing. He smiled out from a two-day growth of beard and offered his hand. Vera looked him in the eye and shook it.

  “What are the odds, Dr. Barnett?” he asked.

  “What? Oh you mean of success with the vaccine? I think they’re pretty good. It better work, because it may be our last hope to save the cat species.”

  The Wilsons read over the release form and signed it without ceremony. It was obvious to Vera that they had already given the matter careful thought and simply wanted to get on with the injection.

  “I think there’s room for the decontamination chamber right here on the porch,” Parsons observed. He turned toward the van. “I’m going to get started.”

  It took a half-hour for them to set up the equipment and start the gasoline-powered air pump. Once started, the motor made a racket. “It’s time for us to disinfect ourselves,” Parsons shouted over the din. “How about you go first. In the back of the van are bottles of Betadine and alcohol, cotton, and sterile protective gowns, caps, and booties.”

  “You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?”

  “I try.”

  Vera climbed into the van. She took off her clothes, except for underwear, thankful that the van was windowless. First, she swabbed her entire body with the Betadine. I look like a pumpkin, Vera mused as she glimpsed the amber tone it had colored her slightly swollen belly. She removed most of the Betadine with alcohol. Vera figured that there was no way FHF could survive the stuff. She finished her preparation by donning the sterile, white, plastic-coated paper jumpsuit, mask, and latex gloves left by Parsons.

  When she emerged from the van, he prepped himself in the same manner. Vera reentered the van and loaded a syringe with the FHF vaccine.

  “Okay, Joanne, you can bring Sugar over,” Parsons yelled.

  The woman approached her pet, but the cat, frightened by the noise of the pump motor, squirmed and fought for release. The vet clasped the animal tightly and took her into the van, where Vera waited with the syringe. While Parsons held the cat still, Vera deftly shot 3 cc of the vaccine under the loose skin in back of the neck, avoiding contact with the cat. “An hour to prepare,” she uttered, “and thirty seconds for the injection. Hope it’s worth it.”

  “God bless you,” said Mrs. Wilson when Larry handed Sugar back to her. “We never had no kids, you know. Jim had a war injury. Sugar is like a child to us.”

  Vera replied, “Well, let’s hope for the best. But, you know there is no guarantee of success.”

  “We read the news on the computer and watch TV,” said Joanne Wilson. “We know how it is. If the cats are dying, someone has to take a chance. I don’t think I’d want the world to be without cats.”

  Vera was suddenly overcome, and she felt like crying. She stepped forward and hugged Joanne Wilson. She then shook Jim Wilson’s hand.

  After she changed back into her travel clothes, Vera handed a booster dose of the vaccine to Parsons and noted, “The second shot should be given to Sugar in about a month. By the way, how old is she?”

  “’Bout nine years, I’d say,” answered Jim Wilson.

  “Spayed?”

  “Yup.”

  I would have been amazed if it wasn’t, Vera thought. We’re just testing the vaccine at this point. If it’s effective, we’ll have to face the problem of locating fertile cats that haven’t had contact with FHF.

  She prepared to leave. Joanne said, “We’ll pray for your success.”

  Vera looked back and waved. She knew she was going to cry, and she hurriedly made for the van. Parsons gunned the motor and headed back down the muddy gravel road. When he heard Vera’s sobs, Parsons reached over and gently clasped her hand, but said nothing. By the time they had plowed through a dozen deep chuckholes and reached the main highway, she had stopped weeping. Vera reflected on her new tendency to cry. She had never understood what people meant when they talked about the emotional effects of pregnancy hormones, but now she got it.

  On Friday, Vera flew to St. John’s, Newfoundland, and, with the assistance of a local veterinarian, injected the vaccine into a black male cat named Simon belonging to the McNaughton woman.

  While Vera was away, more than fifty new applications for the vaccine had come in, some from as far away as Europe. There was one from Santiago, another from Osaka. Half the requests lacked the required vet’s letter; Vera removed them from consideration.

  One evening, Vera read a vituperative letter from Mobile, Alabama castigating, not only her, but Fermentacorp, the institute, and the worldwide secular humanist conspiracy for meddling with God’s Creation. It ended with “May you rot in hell!” Vera groaned. “Secular humanist conspiracy …?”

  Noah looked up from his reading. “What?”

  Vera showed him the letter. Noah shook his head. “Didn’t you tell me that the Wilson woman blessed you?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well then, it’s a wash, isn’t it?”

  Vera smiled, kissed him on the forehead, and sat down next to him. “I made an appointment for an ultrasound.”

  Noah set down the e-reader. He gazed at Vera in silence for a moment. “You know, we don’t need to know whether it’s a boy or a girl. Healthy would be fine with me.” He smiled.

  “I know, but ultrasound is for more than just learning the sex of the baby. If there is anything grossly wrong—two heads, that kind of thing—it would show up.”

  “I hadn’t really considered the idea of anything going wrong. I don’t want to think about it.”

  Vera took his hands in hers and looked him in the eye. “Noah, sometimes things do go wrong, especially with pregnancies in women my age. Let’s not be ostriches.”

  Noah was silent for a moment. “You’re right … as always.”

  The sonogram revealed a healthy female fetus. Vera’s eyes welled with tears—tears of joy, tears of relief. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized that she’d been harboring a suppressed fear of some nameless problem.

  When she told Noah, he hugged her. “Oof!” she cried.

  “Oops. Sorry, I forgot. Gotta be careful from here on. What shall we name her?”

  “We could check the Internet or get one of those baby-naming books from the library. Do you have any favorite names?”

  “How about Bastette, in honor of my dead cat?”

  Vera gave him a hard smack on the shoulder. “Hey! Watch it!” he yelled.

  “You know,” she said, “maybe some kind of feline name isn’t a bad idea. How about Lilith?”

  “Lilith? Is that a feline name?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Vera replied. “Lilith is a quasi-cat goddess. She’s a recurring mythological figure. In one myth, she’s Adam’s twin sister. In another, she’s Adam’s first wife.”

  “First wife!” Noah was unbelieving. “I don’t recall anything in Genesis about any wife other th
an Eve.”

  “I think it’s from the Jewish Kabbalah. There’s more to Judeo-Christian mythology than the Old and New Testaments, you know. Besides, there are Lilith-type myths, not only in Jewish folklore, but in Persian, Babylonian, Greek, Arab, early English, Gothic, Oriental, Native American, and even Mexican legends.”

  Noah was incredulous. “How the hell do you know all this stuff?”

  “I’ve read a lot about cats in mythology. It’s something of a hobby of mine.”

  Noah shrugged. “Lilith it is, then. It’s a pleasing name.”

  “There’s just one thing,” added Vera. “Most of the Lilith myths are rather negative. They paint her as a kind of witch.”

  “You’re not superstitious, and I’m not either, right?”

  “Right. And I agree, Lilith is a pleasing name.”

  Near the end of April, the CDC sent a hazmat team to sterilize Noah’s cat room with ethylene oxide gas. The entire building had to be evacuated for two days, but FHF-free cats could now be brought to the lab without risk of exposure to the virus. Three apparently healthy cats, all spayed females, were the first to be housed in the room. Vera, who was dividing her time between her clinic and Noah’s lab, tested the cats for FHF by using the sensitive ELISA test.

  “Damn!” she cried when she examined the test plate.

  “What is it?” asked Noah.

  “One of the new cats has the virus.”

  Noah looked over the ELISA plate. “We’d better get that cat out of here, fast.” He removed the diseased animal from its cage and placed it in a sterile carrier outfitted with fiber filters over the openings. He dashed out of the lab with the risky package.

  Vera watched, open-mouthed. That boy can move!

  By the middle of May, four cats were under test at the institute. The Pasteur Institute in Paris had immunized seven more.

  “That’s it, then,” said Vera. “Including the Wilson’s cat and the one in Newfoundland, we’re testing thirteen cats with the envelope prep.”

  “I wish we had a larger sample size,” said Noah.

  Near the end of the month, all the test cats had been challenged with FHF virus. When Vera received blood samples drawn from Sugar and Simon, she and Noah performed ELISA tests on the sera. To their dismay, both came up positive for FHF antigens.

  Vera moved away from the lab bench. She stared at the floor. “Maybe …”

  Noah put his arms around her. “There’s no maybe, Vera. The envelope prep isn’t effective.”

  A few weeks later, Vera received e-mails from Grinnell and Newfoundland, Sugar and Simon were dying. Three of the cats housed at the institute were similarly ailing.

  “I just can’t believe it,” sobbed Vera. “I just can’t believe it,” she said over and over. Noah could say nothing to comfort her. The depth of their despair was measured by the extent to which they had allowed their hopes to soar, and by their empathy with the owners of these previously healthy pets.

  Most zoos in North America kept their patrons at some distance from the cats. This policy was put into effect across the US and Canada after several large felines contracted FHF. Fortunately the virus was not universally fatal for big cats. Nevertheless, zookeepers were not taking chances, and, until the course of the disease became better understood, parents were going to have to show their children videos of lions and tigers, pumas and leopards. The only way to view the tigers at the San Diego Zoo was to climb up to a large platform, erected for the purpose, hundreds of feet from the animals and to use field glasses to peer into their compound.

  In San Francisco, Minneapolis, and quite a few other American cities, large and small, support groups were launched for helping those who had lost cats cope with their grief. Many who did not feel comfortable in the group milieu visited their own counselors. Psychiatry and clinical psychology were two professions actually benefitting from the crisis.

  Three new charities had formed whose purpose was to raise funds for research into a cure for FHF. One of these, Citizens Against The Sickness, had already raised four million dollars, although it had not yet received tax-deductible status from the IRS.

  A spokeswoman from CLAWS, an organization notoriously opposed to any use of cats for research, was featured on the CBS evening news. She acknowledged that it might be permissible to test vaccines on cats if this could save the species from extinction.

  22

  June 2021

  12,540,000

  The test cats were dead. Vera was quiet as she lay with her head in Noah’s lap. Gary gazed out the window silently. The injections had failed. The three would-be cat saviors languished in the living room of the Chamberlin home.

  “It’s over, isn’t it?” Vera remarked.

  “It looks like it,” Noah answered. “We’ve run out of ideas. It’s hard to believe, but I think the domestic cat is on the way out. Odd, isn’t it? With all the species extinctions brought about by humans during recent years, this one doesn’t seem to be the fault of Homo sapiens.”

  Vera frowned. “I don’t know, Noah. If we hadn’t collected those different species of wild cats at the Seattle Zoo, gene exchange among species would not have occurred, and the recombinant FHF virus wouldn’t have found its way into that cat, Clyde. In fact, it makes me wonder why such viral diseases are relatively rare in zoo animals.”

  Noah nodded reflectively. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  Gary, who had remained silent, said, “I wish there was some way we could exploit RNA interference.”

  “We discussed that months ago,” said Noah. “You know it hasn’t proved effective in mammals. Besides, the group at the Pasteur Institute looked into RNA interference for FHF last year and gave up on it.”

  “What’s RNA interference?” asked Vera.

  Noah turned to Gary. “You want to explain it?”

  “Sure. You know that most of the RNA in a cell is single-stranded, right?” Vera nodded. “Well, in the late 1990s, someone found that cells also carry a small amount of double-stranded RNA. This dsRNA blocks genes that aren’t supposed to be expressed in a particular cell by destroying any messenger RNA that the gene makes. This destruction is called RNA interference, or RNAi for short.”

  “Good explanation,” said Noah. “In fact, the effect was first identified in a nematode worm … earned the guys who discovered it a Nobel Prize. Later RNAi was found in cells of most higher organisms.”

  “I see,” said Vera. “But why would this RNA interference be considered a cure for a virus?”

  Gary paused. “Consider the retroviruses—those that make DNA copies of their RNA genomes …”

  Vera laughed. “I’m sorry, Gary. You were so intent. Please continue.

  Gary shrugged. “I get that way. Anyway, the genome of a retrovirus is often identical to its messenger RNA. If the right kind of RNA could be introduced into infected cells, it might be able to shut down viral multiplication. When RNAi was discovered, virologists thought that it might be a cure for any number of retroviral infections …”

  “That’s right,” Noah interrupted. “In fact some early experiments were encouraging. Several labs reported success in inhibiting hepatitis B and HIV viruses in human cell cultures. However, getting RNAi to work as a viral cure in whole animals proved to be a challenge. How do you get the interfering RNA into the infected cells? So far, no one has found a way to do it.”

  Gary continued, “Some researchers tried using DNA viruses to insert sequences carrying interfering RNA genes into cells. Once inside, the DNA was supposed to allow the cells to synthesize RNA that would then interfere with whatever gene was under investigation.”

  “I see,” said Vera. “So one could insert into a cell … genes for interfering RNA … complementary to certain FHF genes.” She spoke with a slow, measured cadence as her gray matter absorbed th
e concept. “If the introduced genes functioned properly, they would cause the cell to make interfering RNA.” Her expression brightened. “This would lead to the destruction of messenger RNA specified by those FHF genes.”

  “Couldn’t have put it better,” offered Noah. “The problem is, how do you get the vector DNA into the cells where it is needed? You can’t just inject a virus vector into a cat and hope that all the proper cells will get infected.”

  Vera stared at the rug, brow knotted, as Noah and Gary also pondered the question. Suddenly, she looked up. “Hmmm … if a way could be found to use feline leukemia virus as a vector for interfering RNA genes, those genes might become part of the feline chromosome and act continually to make the interfering RNA.”

  Noah’s jaw dropped, and his eyes opened wide. Gary, who had been gazing out the window, wrenched his head around and stared at Vera. “But FeLV is an RNA retrovirus itself,” he said.

  “Sure it is,” she responded, “but most cats, maybe all of them, have FeLV DNA integrated in their chromosomes. That’s the way the virus reproduces. Feline lymphoid cells become infected with exogenous FeLV virus. Then, DNA from the incoming virus recombines with viral genes in the cat’s genome. That way new genes enter the genome. The vector would have to be altered in some way so it couldn’t cause disease. Isn’t that the kind of thing you genetic engineers do for a living?”

  “That’s just amazing,” said Noah. He turned to Gary, “Why didn’t we think of that?”

  Gary shrugged.

  “I … I was just thinking out loud,” said Vera. “You think this could actually work?”

  “You are theorizing like a seasoned molecular biologist,” said Noah. “Good sentences, and well-pronounced.”