Phineas the feline internet sensation with a degenerative brain disorder

When you first meet Phineas, you could swear he is drunk, or that he has a prescription drug problem, or maybe a bit of both. It’s just gone 2pm on a weekday and yet here he is, weaving down the hallway towards me, wobbly-headed, snaggle-toothed, staggering like a sailor on a rolling sea, and, then, when he’s just a metre or two away, falling flat on his face, after which he hops right back up, perfectly happy, indeed, apparently excited to see me.

Yet Phineas isn’t drunk or high. Phineas is just Phineas. He’s a cat. A cat with special needs, nearly two million social media followers and a unique place in the annals of neuroscience.

“Phin has definitely shaped the way I think about the cerebellum,” says his co-owner, American neuroscientist Collin Anderson. “It’s a unique opportunity to observe a cerebellum disorder, all the time. People at other universities even ask me if they can use videos of him.”

I’m standing with Anderson, who is 35, and his 30-year-old fellow neuroscientist wife Daria, in the Federation cottage they are renting in Sydney’s inner west. It’s a lovely place: high ceilings, stained-glass windows and only one internal step, which is important when you’ve got a disabled cat. The Andersons have been living here since they arrived in Australia in January to take up research positions at Sydney University. Both are experts in their field; Daria researches epilepsy; Collin is working to develop a gene therapy for Christianson syndrome, a rare, degenerative condition that appears in infancy and causes intellectual disability, seizures and ataxias (problems with balance and coordination).

Securing a double act like the Andersons is a coup for the university. “It’s a rare opportunity to find true experts in a field who are able to combine science with their personal passion,” says Professor Gregg Suaning, head of the university’s School of Biomedical Engineering. “They have a great ability to relate complex topics to students in a way that is easily understood and highly relatable.”

By the admittedly geeky standards of biomedical neuroscience, the Andersons are something of an “it” couple: the slim and fine-featured Daria, with long blonde hair and porcelain cheekbones (her parents are Russian), and lantern-jawed Collin, who looks like he just strode manfully off the set of Grey’s Anatomy on his way to a 15-kilometre trail run. (NB: he does actually do 15-kilometre trail runs and also competes in marathons, with a personal best time of two hours 37 minutes, which is considered sub-elite.)

They are also fervent pet people. Apart from Phin, they own an eight-year-old tabby named Tyrion (after the Game of Thrones character) and, until recently, an Airedale terrier called Holly, who died of cancer in January and whose ashes they keep in a brass urn on their mantelpiece, beside a framed photo of her inscribed with the message: “You left your paw prints forever in our hearts.” But Phin is undoubtedly the star of the show. Like some little all-seeing, furry, Middle Eastern despot, he exerts a kind of wordless dominion over the household, the walls of which are adorned with his likeness in every possible aspect – playful Phin, pensive Phin, fierce Phin – all of them rendered by devotees around the world and sent to the Andersons, like tributes to some feline deity. There are stuffed-toy Phins, bottles of Phin beer, Phin caps and T-shirts. Phin’s face is laser-etched into a mirror and embossed on a nip glass. All cats have delusions of grandeur, but in Phin’s case it’s thoroughly justified.

“He’s the most demanding cat I’ve ever known,” says Collin, sitting at the dinner table as Phin circumnavigates us, face-planting at regular intervals. “He’s incredibly loud, and he’ll slam himself on the floor to make noise, or bang against the door or chew power cords to tell us he’s hungry.”

Phin’s character is augmented by his condition, which is known as cerebellar hypoplasia. Cats typically develop this in utero when their mother contracts the panleukopenia virus. The condition, which is sometimes known as wobbly cat syndrome, is a disorder of the cerebellum, which in humans is a peach-sized blob of pinky-grey matter that nestles at the back of your cranium, where the spinal cord meets your brain. The cerebellum is a real overachiever: it’s only one-tenth the size of your brain but contains more than half of all its neurons. (Indeed, cerebellum is Latin for “little brain”.) It’s responsible for muscle control, including balance and movement. Phin’s condition has atrophied his cerebellum, which explains all the falling over and swaying and general clownishness.

He also has trouble modulating his movements, making eating especially problematic. Rather than calmly and steadily holding his mouth to the bowl, he repeatedly jams his face into the food while making a sound like a dead cow being fed into a woodchipper. I’m not going to lie; it’s a little disturbing to watch, not to mention messy. “He’ll spend 20 minutes after each meal cleaning himself up,” says Daria.

People often think Phin is in pain. Some people ask why he hasn’t been put down. “But he’s perfectly happy,” says Collin. “He purrs all the time!” “And he’s always ‘making biscuits’, ” says Daria. (“Making biscuits”, or kneading, is a sign that a cat is content.)

Besides, Phin is an internet sensation, propelled to stardom by an odd blend of vulnerability and indifference, and by the swagger he displays (quite literally) in the face of a debilitating condition. You could say that Phin is just doing Phin. He doesn’t care what people think. He now has close to 2 million followers combined on Instagram and TikTok, a fame the Andersons have leveraged to raise awareness about cerebellar disorders, and to fundraise for animal sanctuaries and educational charities. “We’ve now donated $36,000 through merchandising and fundraising,” Collin says.

Perhaps most importantly, Phin has become a handy teaching aid, the ultimate learning tool for our cataholic age. “When I’m lecturing on cerebellum disorders, I’m constantly using slides of Phin and his behaviour. So instead of some grainy video from the 1980s, we have videos of Phin, and it’s so much more engaging. I mean, everyone loves cat videos, right?”

The Andersons met in 2014, in the biomedical engineering PhD program at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. “When I first saw him, it was a bit of a gasp moment,” says Daria. “Love at first sight.”

Daria moved in with Collin (and Holly) in 2014; they married in 2015. One day in late 2016, Daria was perusing @cats_of_instagram when she came across a post featuring a litter of five kittens that had been born in a foster home in Washington, D.C. Two of the kittens, named Goblin and Ghost, had something wrong with them: they weren’t thriving, and were particularly wobbly on their feet, even for kittens, which tend to be adorably wobbly. (Goblin was the worst of the two.) Within a week, they were diagnosed with cerebellar hypoplasia.

“I had just started to work on the cerebellum, so I messaged the foster home, saying, ‘I hope he does well and finds a good home,’ ” says Collin. A month later, however, Goblin still hadn’t been adopted, so the Andersons offered to take him. They renamed him Phineas, after the Finn character in the 2015 Star Wars film The Force Awakens. (They’re at a loss to explain why they did this, especially since Daria fell asleep during the movie.)

“When I’m lecturing on cerebellum disorders, I’m constantly using slides of Phin and his behaviour.”

Collin Anderson

In January 2017, Collin flew to Washington, D.C. to pick him up. “It was meant to be a same-day, fly-in, fly-out thing, but a blizzard hit and I got stranded and had to find a cat-friendly hotel for the night.” On the flight home the next day, Collin was bumped up to first class. Phin was, of course, a first-time flyer. Rather than have him travel in the hold, then, Collin paid to have him on his lap, in a carrier. “People were like, ‘Who brings their cat into first class?’ But I told them he was a disabled kitten and everyone was really nice.”

The foster home already had an Instagram page for Phin, with just a couple of thousand followers, so Collin and Daria decided to keep it going. Originally they posted about his various issues: his constipation and his appalling table manners, both of which were related to his condition. He was also incredibly loud, with a meow like an air-raid siren, and seemed to want to have a conversation all the time, a bit like an oversharing flatmate. He was affectionate and needy and drunk-looking, all of which the internet went nuts for.

“Still, we were mainly posting for ourselves,” Collin says. “Just so we’d have a record of him.”

In late 2018, however, a couple of well-known cat meme pages posted clips of Phin, and he suddenly went viral. “Within a month we had, like, 100,000 followers,” Collin says. “Within six months we had 500,000!” (Phin now has 825,000 Instagram followers and 1.1 million on TikTok.)

People began messaging Collin and Daria, demanding more content, and asking why Phin’s videos weren’t longer. “We had people saying, ‘I was suicidal until I came across a video of Phin. This is the only thing that gets me through the day,’ ” says Collin. As Daria puts it, “We began to feel a huge responsibility, so we began to do a better job of it.”

In 2019 they went on holiday to Europe, taking care to prepare enough clips to post every day while they were away, even scheduling them to account for the time difference so that Phin’s fans in the United States would see them at the optimal time. Soon the Andersons were receiving dozens of unsolicited art works, including from the cult website wildmasterpieces.com, which specialises in highly stylised, faux-heroic pet portraits. “When that happened, it was like, ‘We’ve made it!’ ” Collin says.

Phin was becoming a muse. But the Andersons hadn’t considered making him a brand. It just didn’t feel right. But then wildmasterpieces.com asked if the Andersons would allow it to sell T-shirts with Phin’s portrait on them. “They said, ‘You can make some money out of it!’ ” Collin remembers. “But we told them we’d feel more comfortable if they donated our share of the sales to a cat rescue organisation, which they did. It made about $2000, which was cool and unexpected.”

Similar opportunities started popping up. The Andersons allowed a couple of breweries in Salt Lake City to make Phin beer, the only condition being that it donate some of the proceeds to a local animal shelter. In 2021, the Andersons sold a series of differently coloured Phineas baseball caps, raising more than $9000 for a range of charities, including one that helps Ukrainian refugees and another that provides scholarships to black college students.

In time, however, Phin’s role went beyond fundraising. In 2019, Collin began working on Christianson syndrome, which in research terms remained a relatively open field. (The genetic mutation that causes the disease was only identified in 2008.) He met families affected by the condition, including, in 2022, the president of the Christianson Syndrome Association in the US, Debbie Nash, whose 27-year-old son, Andrew, has the condition. “Collin is such a caring individual,” Nash tells me in an email. “He wants to find a treatment for the condition and its effects on humans, and animals as well. Along the way he has used [his work with Phin] to help many others and give hope to those that need answers. It’s true human kindness!!”

Christianson syndrome, which only affects boys, produces a range of symptoms, from intellectual disability, epilepsy and ataxia to a lack of speech and hyperkinesis, or constant moving. Despite this, those with it often have a happy, playful demeanour. “You see the boys are smiling and they love their families,” Collin says.

The same is true of Phin. “I haven’t met Phin in person, but as Collin and I chatted about Phineas and Andrew, I felt such a wonderful connection,” Nash explains. “We noticed many similarities between the two. Both had unsteady ataxic gaits and shared such determination to not let that slow them down from getting what they wanted. They were both still in the baby stage: Phin the playful-kitty stage, Andrew in the exploring-toddler stage. We commented on how happy they both are even with their limitations. The one thing that stood out was how each of them can put a smile on the face of everybody they meet.”

In her email to me, Nash attaches images of Andrew, who has red hair, and Phin, side by side. “We also chuckle at the fact that they are both gingers :),” she writes.

If anything, the burden of Christianson syndrome is most keenly felt by the families whose loved ones have it, particularly the parents. “It’s a 24-hour job to care for these people,” says Collin. “And the implications are massive. People don’t grow out of this. The boys grow into men, and it can become challenging for an ageing parent to manage them. It’s a tremendous toll on the families, [so] if there is anything I can do to bring about a treatment, then that’s great.”

Collin’s research is focused on gene therapy. “It means developing a gene replacement targeted to specific cells in the brain,” he says. The technique has shown promising results in rats in the US; Collin aims to continue such testing in Australia. But as with most such research, the race for a treatment is a marathon not a sprint, with progress measured in millimetres. “If everything goes well, researchers may still be five to 10 years away from human trials.”

Unfortunately, the studies aren’t relevant to Phin. “His condition isn’t genetic,” says Collin. “And even if gene therapies existed for pets, they would be prohibitively expensive for owners because of the high costs of development and testing.”

Phin seems destined, then, to remain an influencer, playing his part on the frontlines of social media. He’s perfect for it, after all. Supermodel Linda Evangelista wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000. Phin will fall over himself for a bowl of food.

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