This isn’t FDC Willard, but let’s pretend it is, with some of his many academic awards
“Science must be understood as a gutsy human enterprise.” Stephen Jay Gould
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Yes, scientists are human. They even have a sense of humor. Consider the career of F.D.C. Willard. He’s known for being listed as an author of serious research papers, and he’s a cat. His career is still discussed today!
It seems Jack H. Hetherington, a Michigan State University physics professor, wrote a soon-to-be-influential paper on the low-temperature physics of helium-3 isotopes. He was the sole author, but in the formal tone of research, he had
written the entire paper using the “we” pronoun. This was against the journal’s style rules. Hetherington’s paper would surely be rejected if it wasn’t retyped. livescience
Like any of us, he hated the idea of retyping his paper (this was before word processors,) so he solved his problem with a touch of whimsy. He added a co-author, his cat Felis Domesticus Chester, or F.D.C. He gave F.D.C. a family name following the usual practice of Americans, adding the cat’s father’s name of Willard. Now there were two authors and no need to change the paper.
Hetherington’s solution wasn’t a secret. His colleagues were fine with it and even enjoyed the joke. F.D.C. Willard became famous in the small world of helium-3 physics.
Several years later, a French paper on helium-3 appeared under a single author’s name: F.D.C. Willard. Apparently, the actual research team could not agree on a version of the paper that satisfied them all, so they decided to credit America’s best-published cat instead. livescience
Henceforth, F.D. C. Willard appeared repeatedly in footnotes, where he was thanked for “useful contributions to the discussion” or oral communications, and was even offered a professorship by a Professor and Imminently Erstwhile Chairman:
In response to your valued letter of 25 November: let me admit at once that if you had not written I should never have had the temerity to think of approaching so distinguished a physicist as F. D. C. Willard, F.R.S.C., with a view to interesting him in joining a university department like ours, which after all, was not even rated among the best 30 in the 1969 Roose-Anderson study… Can you imagine the universal jubilation if in fact Willard could be persuaded to join us, even if only as a Visiting Distinguished Professor? wikipedia
On April 1, 2014 (note the date) the American Physical Society announced that cat-authored papers would be open-access, rather than behind a pay-wall.
This post is mostly quotations, because I can’t improve on reality.
If you plan a career in research, be sure to take your sense of humor with you. After all, you might have to survive your colleagues knowing you once announced you’d discovered Mars.
UPDATE 1: Trouble agreeing on article versions and authorship isn’t that rare. An article was recently retracted by Science Direct because “the authors of the article ‘Parallel bimodal single-cell sequencing of transcriptome and methylome provides molecular and translational insights on oocyte maturation and maternal aging’ cannot agree on who should be listed as an author of the article.” Attributing the paper to Willard would be a much better outcome, and I’m sure the cat is multi-disciplinary.
UPDATE 2: “Not only did [Hetherington’s] paper become widely cited, but eventually the world found out about Chester’s authorship — arousing more publicity. The University of Michigan leveraged this attention, even offering Chester a faculty position as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow… Chester went on to co-author two more papers and one solo paper before passing away in 1982 at the age of 14. His Google Scholar profile shows around 104 citations of his papers… Chester’s story is just one of a handful in which scientists have added a pet or animal test subject as a co-author.” Click on the article for more at Discover Magazine
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