Zócalo Public Square

UCLA cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and UCLA writing lecturer Kathryn Bowers, authors of Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About the Health and Science of Healing, talk with Los Angeles Times science writer Eryn Brown about what they think is medicine's next frontier: collaboration between human and animal doctors. Animal and human diseases across the spectrum--from eating disorders and psychiatric maladies to certain types of cardiac arrest and cancers--overlap. And by working together and sharing knowledge, doctors and veterinarians might be able to better treat patients of all species. Natterson-Horowitz and Bowers share many of their discoveries, from the possibility that jaguars share the BRCA1 gene mutation that's common in Jewish women, and increases susceptibility to breast cancer, to a chlamydia epidemic in koalas in Australia.