Well, as I’ve stated before, many times, I think the important part of research that I’m interested in is the clinically applicable research, esoteric research maybe, you know, but that’s not, I’m not gonna be going in for that. I mean that’s to answer some theory that I can’t in my mind directly relate back to how we’re gonna manage care, or take care of the animals, but it may be important scientifically. So I’m in kind of favor of information we can use right away, like I talked about on the bird fractures, and another one was the antibiotic doses of the elephants, and then I did some early studies on antibiotic doses in snakes, turtles, and birds, because they have different metabolic rates, and nobody had ever translated how these different metabolic rates affect the dose or the frequency that you give the drug, so that was basic clinical research that we used almost right away before we published, and I think it helped because initially when Gentamycin came out, it was touted as the great drug for gram-negative bacteria, which are one of the major causes of death and illness in reptiles, and they were giving the mammalian dose to reptiles, snakes, and we were knocking out their kidneys, because it was a nephrotoxic antibiotic. So we took a step back and said, “Well let’s figure out how long it takes.” So we gave doses of antibiotics, and then measured blood levels on snakes and found out you give half the dose every 72 hours, instead of the full dose every day. And we could obtain and maintain therapeutic levels without knocking out their kidneys. And just to make sure we biopsied serially, biopsied kidneys on these snakes, just to make sure we weren’t seeing some other subtle changes that weren’t showing up.
