The SuperVet

Hi animal lovers,

A 2018 episode of the podcast The Life Scientific featured Noel Fitzpatrick, more commonly known as `Supervet”, in which he talked about his life story and the process of creating bionic limbs for animals. Fitzpatrick was inspired to study veterinary medicine by the death of a lamb on his family’s farm, and later became passionate about creating bionic limbs for his patients due to his uncle being an amputee. He found that it takes a strange alchemy of compassion and problem-solving oriented intelligence, and was inspired by this challenge.

His wish was to create truly bionic limbs, as opposed to the traditional suction cup protheses. He collaborated with biomedical engineers utilizing a biomimetic to study how deer antler skin grows into bone when they are knocked off during the rutting season. This research provided Fitzpatrick with an answer to the main problem preventing bionic limbs, “How can infection be prevented when the skin grows onto the foreign object?” By collaborating with these researchers, he was able to solve this through a process of anchoring the metal to the skeleton, allowing the skin to bond onto the metal. This procedure was first performed on a cat named Oscar whose back legs had been crushed in a combine harvester. The procedure was wildly successful and Oscar became known as the “bionic cat”. This same procedure was later given to more animals and eventually a woman who had lost her arm in the Boston bombing.This is just one example of how veterinary medicine and human medicine can overlap, in which medical doctors and veterinarians can learn from each other to help provide better care to both humans and animals.

While there is a fine line between revolutionary medicine, and simply carrying out experiments on animals, Fitzpatrick strictly follows the guidelines of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, in which any procedure must be in specific interest of the patient, and all other options must be explained to the family. While many vets prefer euthenasia, or more conservative solutions such as amputation, Fitzpatrick strives to provide more options to the client. Some veterinarians disagree with Fitzpatrick’s mission on ethical grounds, to which he responds, “If human medicine is going to move forward anyways…why are we denying our patients (animal) the choice?”. I believe that his work to reconverge human and animal medicine is helping to change the world of medicine for the better.