Columnist Susan Snyder: Pet project an inexact science

Monday, Feb. 21, 2005 | 8:14 a.m.

National Institutes of Health officials are spending $5.5 million to map the genome of a cat named Cinnamon.

Scientists, veterinarians, geneticists, zoologists and cat conservationists are terribly excited about it all.

Cinnamon, of course, thinks the money would be better spent on canned albacore.

But according to a recent report published in Science Times, Americans spend about $4 billion annually on food for the estimated 60 million cats they tend. Their dedication to their feline companions' well-being and health has contributed to veterinarians' identification of more than 250 genetic diseases.

Cats' genetic structure is so similar to that of humans that the cat versions of some cancers and the feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) provide good models for studying the progressions of these diseases, the report says.

So researchers at the National Human Genome Research Institute are embarking on a study that promises to be labor intensive.

As if we could expect it to be any other way?

The report says the cat genome is large and complicated. Although high-tech equipment is used at every stage of the mapping process, "more than 100 people are involved in one way or another."

And that's just to get Cinnamon out of the carrier and onto the exam table. Another 50 people will be needed to extract some blood so Cinnamon's DNA can be broken into puzzle pieces.

My suspicion is that under a microscope, the cat's genome will actually turn out to be a series of tiny gnomes that are conjoined twins attached back-to-back. They will have tiny whiskers and pointy little ears.

One twin will be sound asleep. The other will have a mischievous grin and giggle a lot.

While this discovery may not cure cancer, it certainly would explain a lot of what we experience in our household.

For example, I would like to know which pair of gnomes gives one relatively small, cuddly mammal the ability to turn a typically comforting audio sensation such as a purr into a sound that can wake a human at 3 a.m. as effectively as a smoke detector.

And I would be interested to know whether it is a single pair of gnomes that enable the domestic feline to eat and effectively digest a live, fur-bearing animal such as a mouse, yet will not allow the cat to pass a similar-size clump of its own fur.

This clump, for some unforeseen genetic reason, must be regurgitated in the middle of the night in the center of the living room carpet, following a sound reminiscent of a rubber plunger sucking a Volkswagen from a drainpipe.

Cinnamon, the report claims, is "not just any cat." She hails from a carefully bred colony raised at the University of Missouri. Scientists are able to track her lineage for decades, it says, so they "know exactly what they are getting."

Amateurs. Neither scientist nor helpless cat owner knows exactly what one is getting with a cat. It doesn't matter who her parents are.

Cinnamon, of course, knows this. And so, $5.5 million will not be enough.

She will roll over on her back, curl those endearing, fuffy paws around her ears and mew.

"More catnip, please."