It’s no wonder that science has sometimes been an odd bedfellow of horse racing, a sport built upon centuries of weathered and revered traditions.

In 1872, former California governor and horse owner Leland Stanford commissioned British photographer Eadweard Muybridge to photograph his racehorses in action. Legend has it Stanford hoped to settle a wager that, in a fast trot, all four of a horse’s feet are off the ground at some point.

Muybridge proved him right. What he shot with a few primitive cameras were the first photographs of a fast-moving horse, and what they proved shocked the world. Not only did all four feet come off the ground, but a horse’s legs never stretched fore and aft, as generations of painters had mistakenly shown in their work.

Some said his photos looked absurd. Others said Muybridge was a fraud. But his studies were so ground breaking that the journal Scientific American published them on its cover in October, 1878.

We’ve come a long way.

More than 100 years after Muybridge’s work, research has given trainers and breeders an intimate knowledge of the horse both inside and out, changing the sport of kings in profound ways. Raising a champion Thoroughbred has always been as much art and chance as science, and that’s not likely to change anytime too soon. But millions of dollars are invested each year to find new ways to improve the odds a horse will have what it takes.

In Kentucky, companies market sophisticated software that measures nearly every part of a horse’s movement in hopes of “predicting” how big a winner – or loser – it will be. Veterinarians use ultrasounds and treadmill tests to scrutinize horses’ heart function and gait. And in molecular genetics laboratories at the University of Kentucky, scientists are earnestly scouring the horse genome for better ways to treat disease and injuries that often end racehorses’ careers.

“I think we’re getting a worse racehorse as we go along,” said Dr. Joe Pagan, president of Kentucky Equine Research, Inc., a multi-million dollar research firm in Paris with a subsidiary in Australia. Pagan worries that ultra-selective breeding has created Thoroughbreds with weak bones and hulking muscles that can only run over short distances and are highly vulnerable to injuries.

To address such problems, Pagan develops food additives for raising better horses. His firm also markets software programs that chart nearly every gram of nutrients a horse consumes, whether from grass in an autumn pasture in New York or specialty feeds in a stall.

But horse nutrition is only the beginning.

Horse Medicine
A trip to a modern equine hospital provides a glimpse of just how far science has brought horse racing. Lexington’s Rood & Riddle Equine Hospital is one of the largest such facilities in the nation. Oversized doors and washable concrete floors aside, it feels in many ways like any metropolitan hospital – surgeons being paged over the loudspeaker, radiologists scrambling to and from a massive X-ray lab in blue scrubs.

The hospital performs more than 4,000 general anesthesia surgeries a year. It offers patients an array of special diagnostic tools like a horse treadmill, a giant MRI, and nuclear imaging technologies for analyzing tiny fractures and tissue injuries.

As little as 15 years ago, specialized horse care was largely limited to veterinary teaching hospitals. But private centers like Rood & Riddle and Haggard, Davidson & McGee, also in Lexington, have been popping up around the nation in recent years, spurred to some degree by a new understanding of horse physiology. Alan Ruggles, an orthopedic surgeon and part owner at Rood & Riddle, boasted that the hospital was one of the first in Lexington – either for humans or horses – to incorporate digital radiology technology.

Modern medicine, along with more aggressive attitudes toward physical therapy, has drastically reduced recovery time for horses after many procedures. A horse recovering from surgery in the 1980s, for example, typically went months before it could take a rider. Now horses are often on their feet walking within hours.

“It used to be certain injuries were considered career-ending, and now with arthroscopic and other techniques, they’re not,” Ruggles said. “Twenty years ago, no one would buy a horse that had surgery. Now it’s pretty common.”

Perhaps most importantly, medical technology has greatly increased the amount of diagnostic tools and information available. A trainer can find out exactly what’s wrong with a horse and what the options are, eliminating guesswork in a world where every day on the calendar is valuable. Everyone wants to know about injured horses: “Could they continue on? How serious is it?” Ruggles said. “If they can continue to perform without the risk of injury, you need to know that. And if they can’t, you need to know that, too.”

Nearly every advancement in human medicine that has an application in the equine world has taken hold there. Rood & Riddle’s neonatal care unit, for example, has boosted the chances for survival of premature foals compared to two decades ago. Then, dressing a preemie foal in long johns and feeding it by hand were its best chance of survival. Now oxygen tubes and IVs are standard equipment in such cases.

Even at elite horse farms, veterinarians are taking extra measures to speed healing in their horses. Winstar Farms, in Versailles, has two hyperbaric oxygen chambers it uses on injured horses and, for the first time this year, all its foals. Under supervision, the horses spend an hour or two breathing pressurized air, which many studies have shown stimulates the immune system and improves blood flow.

Such treatment doesn’t come cheaply. Medical care for premature foals at Rood & Riddle can cost $500 a day. And hyperbaric oxygen chambers are still too experimental for most farms to invest in. Trainers must weigh the cost of expensive care against a horse’s potential.

Looking to DNA
Given the expense of providing cutting-edge health care for horses, could there be a better way? What if cheaper, more effective treatments could be developed by studying a horse’s very genes? What if breeders could learn enough about a horse to decide ahead of time if its offspring would be vulnerable to one disease or another? Or even more alluring, what if a DNA test could help breeders understand how to better make a young Secretariat or Smarty Jones?

Enter the Horse Genome Project, the equine version of the human genome effort. Begun in 1995, the project was started by a group of geneticists concerned that genetic research on horses was falling behind that of other animals. Dr. Ernest Bailey, a geneticist at UK’s Gluck Equine Research Center and the genome effort’s coordinator, got together with other scientists and decided to collaborate. They shared DNA samples and resources.

Today, the genome project involves 25 labs in 15 countries. Its goal is not to chart every nucleotide that makes up DNA, but to map – identifying genes and markers on the chromosomes of the horse. Armed with that knowledge, researchers say it could be possible for breeders to screen for genes that produce bad traits. Or perhaps they could identify genes that help produce strong bones or a strong heart. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, whereas horses have 32 pairs.

Those ideas would have been the stuff of dreams just a decade or two ago. But scientists are increasingly convinced the project could radically improve the health of racehorses by simply giving breeders better information to work with.

“Horse people over the years have selected horses for raw racing ability,” said Dr. James MacLeod, a bone and muscle specialist at the Gluck Center. “But issues related to durability, the exercise-induced hemorrhage, correct conformation, good hoof growth – we can in the coming years begin to look for genes that will have major influences on some of those traits, which we could never do before.”

Indeed, molecular research is helping scientists understand how genes affect horses’ physiology, as well. MacLeod’s research has centered on looking to the genome to better understand what causes equine arthritis and why horses are so prone to disabling joint injuries, which may lead to more effective treatments and faster recovery times.

Expensive Work
So far, no one has stumbled upon the “speed gene.” And that may not ever happen because, contrary to Hollywood storylines, superhero horses can’t just be turned on with the flip of a switch, scientists say. Bailey has spent a lot of time preaching that so many variables affect the training of a champion horse there is probably no one gene that holds the secret.

Good thing, too. Any formula for genetically manufacturing the perfect horse is unlikely to be welcome in a sport whose beauty, many see, lies in the intangible skills of breeders, trainers and riders.

“There’s an aspect of this that is sort of gee-whiz science. In the horse industry, we run into people who are very supportive and others who say, my gosh, this is going to take all the mystery out of horse breeding,” Bailey said. “The things we’re doing are going to make the horse breeders better at the things they’re already doing. It’s not going to fundamentally change anything.”

In fact, DNA is a tool already in use by many breeders. DNA tests are a standard way to prove parentage. At UK’s Equine Parentage Verification and Research Laboratory, scientists use DNA plucked from a strand of hair or a drop of blood to predict certain color patterns parents will pass on to foals – spotting, for example, or the bay coat pattern of a black mane, tail and legs.

In the end, researchers at UK emphasize their work is about improving the health and quality of horses, which will improve equine sports of all kinds – lengthening careers and perhaps boosting overall winnings.

But for all its promise, the genome project carries big price tag. In MacLeod’s laboratory, a small plastic box atop one counter that analyses DNA might cost $25,000, and a robotic arm in a corner that prepares samples might run upwards of $30,000.

And the work can be painstakingly tedious. Research assistants must clock hundreds of hours scanning and studying samples before a gene can even be isolated for further analysis. The human genome effort, a global collaboration that spelled out the nucleotides on human DNA, cost over $3 billion. And scientists are only just beginning understand what the code means.

Bailey is trying to speed the research ahead by tapping into the same technology that decoded the human genome. He’s applied for a grant that would have the National Human Genome Research Institute – an organization with some of the most advanced molecular laboratories in the world – sequence roughly 85 percent of the horse genome. That would open the door to myriad new research proposals, Bailey said.

A decision on Bailey’s proposal is expected late this month or in early October. Until then, the fundamental problem of horse research nags: There are few people in Washington lobbying for more equine research money. The pork and poultry industries, for example, got a much earlier start on studying the pig and chicken genomes. Horses are not a food crop, cannot solve world hunger, and are largely seen as an entertainment industry.

But they are a critical industry, Bailey said. And that can’t be ignored.

“The horse isn’t about food and fiber. It’s about economics,” Bailey said. “And economics are important as well.”

Andy Olsen is managing editor of The Lane Report.

editorial@lanereport.com