UCLA cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz is coauthor of Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing. Before talking about how she’s challenging the divide between human and animal medicine, she sat down in the Zócalo green room to talk about her musical taste (her kids don’t approve), her bucket list (she wants to go on safari), and why she doesn’t eat a heart-healthy breakfast (most cardiologists start the day with coffee).
Q. How do you respond to panhandlers?
A. If they ask for food and I have food, I hand them the food. And it depends. I guess it depends on where they are, and what I’m doing.
Q. What was your first pet’s name?
A. Frisky. She was a cat, and she was sort of half indoors and half outdoors. She used to catch birds in the backyard and bring them to us as love offerings, which our parents didn’t appreciate.
Q. What do you eat for breakfast?
A. Coffee. I think if you got cardiologists together most of them would say they drink coffee for breakfast …
Q. If you could be any animal, what would you be?
A. Maybe a California condor. I think being able to see things from 30,000 feet, or 10,000 feet, makes you wise. They’re beautiful and resourceful, but mostly it’s their ability to fly high and take the broader view instead of focusing on the minutiae.
Q. What’s one item on your bucket list?
A. I want to go on safari one day with a bunch of really smart veterinarians and public health doctors and naturalists, and like six evolutionary biologists who are just geniuses. I want to spend three hours sleeping and the rest of the time seeing beautiful wildlife, and hearing the evolutionary biologists talk to the naturalists and vets. We’d get completely exhausted talking and seeing and figuring out how to conserve all this precious beauty through this safari brain trust.
Q. When did you last laugh?
A. I laughed a lot today–I laugh when my kids don’t love my musical taste. They’re constantly trying to have me listen to their music, which is really hip. I snuck a Josh Groban song, and my son busted me, and we laughed.
Q. What was your greatest fear as a kid?
A. I had read The Boys From Brazil, and had heard that there were these Nazis who had come to the U.S. and were embedded and hiding around. My big sister convinced me they were living in houses on our block, and there was a brief period when I believed her.
Q. What’s the last song you sang aloud?
A. I was just singing “Payphone” by Maroon 5 in the car.
Q. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
A. When you’re not sure what to do, sometimes the best action is just standing still for a moment, being still. Sometimes the best action is stillness.
Q. What teacher or professor changed your life, if any?
A. Karel Liem. He was an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, and I worked in his lab. He was passionate about evolutionary biology and comparative biology. He was kind; he was encouraging; he was funny as hell. And as a professor now at UCLA, from time to time I think of him and aspire to his generosity, his wisdom, and his humor with my own students.
*Photo by Aaron Salcido.