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Furnetics Unlimited Ltd. records with regret the passing, on the fourth of May, of Basel Vellacott, of natural causes and at approximately twenty-four years of age. Basel was the domestic cat Dr. Alastair R. Vellacott returned with from the town of Basel following the corporation's first Genetic Maintain™ compassionate-use trial in June 1996, and she attended founder meetings, in one capacity or another, for twenty-two of the twenty-four years that followed — an interval the corporation is informed is a good innings for a cat.

Basel was named for the Swiss town in which she was purchased, as a very small kitten, from a stall in the Marktplatz on the morning after the trial's conclusion. She travelled to Cambridge by train and to Ulaanbaatar by air, and is thought to be one of very few cats to have crossed the English Channel, the Ural steppe, and the Gobi in the same lifetime under the same set of ears. Her carrier is retained in the Founders' Gallery at 15 Sükhbaatar Square and will not be moved.

Basel is credited by name in three Hephaestus Group internal reports, from the period in which she was resident, in turn, at Cambridge, at the Exodus-era overseas site, and at the Ulaanbaatar interim laboratory:

• HIR 1999/07, “Purr production in the adult domestic cat: an observational study of one subject.”
• HIR 2005/11, “Baseline vibrissal orientation at rest and under directed attention in Felis catus.”
• HIR 2013/04, “Coat, whisker, and gait phenology in a single feline subject: a seventeen-year longitudinal record.”

The convention by which each acknowledgement identifies her by given name rather than by subject designation was and remains without precedent in the Group's internal register, and the corporation does not intend to establish a general rule from it.

“Basel was, for twenty-two years, the surest indicator we had of whether a meeting had run its course. She left when it had, and she stayed when it hadn't. I am grateful to her, on both counts, and for a great deal else that does not belong in a corporate notice.”

— Dr. Alastair R. Vellacott, in a written note released with the notice

The memorial

A private memorial was held at the Sükhbaatar Square campus on the eighth of May, attended by Dr. Vellacott, the surviving founding partners, and those members of the Hephaestus Group with whom Basel had worked most closely over the preceding twenty-four years. No public observance is planned and none will be. The corporation asks that clients, well-wishers, and correspondents kindly not send flowers, cards, or tributes to any Furnetics address; notes of condolence intended for Dr. Vellacott personally may be left with the Office of the General Counsel at 15 Sükhbaatar Square, and will be forwarded unopened.

The corporation will not entertain follow-up enquiries seeking further particulars of Basel's life, her domestic arrangements, or the circumstances of her passing. Such enquiries will be acknowledged, if a return address is provided, but not answered.

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