Animal Co-Authors

Animals, of course, play a big role in many scientists’ lives. Sometimes they are research subjects. Sometimes they’re a source of inspiration. In my own work, large portions of my thesis were written with my laptop sitting delicately on top of my cat Schroedinger. At the other end of the spectrum, I frequently had to remind my other cat Archimedes that she was not in fact a co-author on this paper and needed to stay off the keyboard. Today we are talking about several cases of actual animal co-authors.

Kanzi Wamba, Panbanisha Wamba and Nyota Wamba (Bonobos)

These three probably have the strongest case for authorship out of all the animals on the list. In “Welfare of Apes in Captive Environments: Comments On, and By, a Specific Group of Apes”, the entire point of the paper was to communicate with the bonobos to determine the appropriate environment for keeping them in captivity. Unlike the other cases, even the title is upfront about the fact that some of the authors aren’t human. Authorship is a complicated question and obviously the bonobos were not involved in the editorial process, but their role in the actual research is quite clear.

H. A. M. S. ter Tisha (Hamster)

While not explicitly stated in the title like the bonobos, the pen name is really not trying to disguise the fact that one of the authors is a hamster. Tisha’s human co-author Andre Geim insists that she did make significant contributions to “Detection of earth rotation with a diamagnetically levitating gyroscope”. What, exactly, those contributions were is harder to determine. Geim did win the Ig Nobel prize for using magnets to levitate a frog, so I’d speculate that it was some sort of extension of that work. He also never disclosed what Tisha’s copious initials are meant to stand for.

Also noteworthy: Geim would later go on to win an actual Nobel Prize. Tisha was not involved with his graphene work, so we don’t have to worry that she was robbed.

Galadriel Mirkwood (Dog)

In “In a fully H-2 incompatible chimera, T cells of donor origin can respond to minor histocompatibility antigens in association with either donor or host H-2 type”  it is not readily apparent that the second author is in fact a dog. Though the fact that it’s the name of a Lord of the Rings character might suggest that something unusual is going on. Side note: I’m not sure why her name is Galadriel Mirkwood when the Mirkwood elves are among the few not related to Galadriel.

The usual convention for scientific papers is either to write in the passive voice or use the “science we” where it is implied that all steps are carried out by the full author list rather than the grad student who is actually in the lab. However, it’s rather difficult to convincingly use “we” on a single author paper. Polly Metzinger solved that problem by crediting her dog.

The journal editor was… less than impressed when he found out he’d accepted a paper co-authored by a dog. Metzinger was banned from submitting any further papers to the Journal of Experimental Immunology until after he died. Fortunately for her, when she came up for tenure review  the committee decided that since the dog did exist and often visited the lab, what she did didn’t actually constitute fraud. And in a telling comment on the politics of authorship, they noted that Galadriel “had done no less research than some other coauthors had.”

That said, when she realized a key aspect of her revolutionary immune model by watching her sheepdog Annie she opted not to give the dog authorship.

F. D. C. Willard (Cat)

And now we come to the only animal co-author to actually have two papers. F. D. C. Willard  received authorship on “Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He”  in another case of grammatical convenience. Jack H. Hetherington asked a colleague to review the paper and they brought up the fact that the editor of Physical Review Letters was on a crusade against the “science we” on single author papers. Since this was the era of typewriters, switching the entire manuscript into first person singular would have meant retyping it entirely.
So clearly the solution was to somehow acquire a co-author. The science world is rather small, and Hetherington figured people might catch on to the fact that Chester was actually his cat’s name and so he decided the cat’s full name was now Felix Domesticus Chester Willard, Willard being Chester’s father.

Eventually, a visitor to the university wanted to see Hetherington and upon discovering he was away, asked for Willard instead. And I absolutely refuse to use the phrase “the cat was out of the bag” here even if Hetherington did. The physics community decided this was all quite entertaining and Hetherington started handing out signed reprints at conferences, including a pawprint from Chester. Other scientists would thank him in their acknowledgements for “useful discussions”. And they probably were quite useful! The cat was even invited to join the physics department .

Willard eventually also had a sole author paper in French. There was much debate among the humans involved as to how exactly they were going to present the data. While everyone agreed that it needed to be published, no one was happy enough with the compromise final product to have their name on it. They thus decided they were going to Alan Smithee the situation and gave F. D. C. Willard sole authorship.

Oh, and the reason the full text of Chester’s first paper is available for free? The American Physical Society announced that they would be making all feline authored papers open access as an April Fool’s joke.

As a final note, I wrote most of this post with Archimedes sitting in my lap.