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This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lickman. Today in the podcast, the underdogs of pet research.

People didn't think that cats had as much to study, which I think anybody who lives with a cat

will know that they're nothing, if not full of questions.

Despite humans' long history of welcoming felines into our homes and our bodegas, cat research lags far behind

that of dogs. Now scientists are working to close the cat gap by enlisting cat caretakers from

across the country to submit a tuft of fur and answer a few questions about their feline's

appearance, personality, and behaviors. Here to tell us all about

this new project, and what we do and don't know about cat genetics is my guest. Dr. Eleanor Carlson,

chief scientific officer at Darwin's Ark, a professor at UMass Chan Medical School, and director

of the vertebrate genomics group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard Universities.

Eleanor, welcome back to Science Friday.

Thank you very much for having me.

Why is there more research about dogs than cats?

That's a really good question.

I could come up with a lot of reasons why scientifically we focused more on dog genetics early on.

There are a lot of advantages to the

breeds that we have in dogs, especially when genomics was very difficult in the beginning.

But I think also people didn't think for some reason that cats had as much to study,

which I think anybody who lives with a cat will know that they're nothing, if not full of

questions. The cat people are pounding their fists right now against their tables, you know?

I mean, I'm like, are cats like the women of scientific research, you know, like ignored, basically.

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