As chief veterinarian at the Baltimore Zoo, Dr. Michael Cranfield has operated on giraffes, knocked out tigers with blowguns and looked for a cure for malaria in penguins.
Now he will help figure out how to save the 400-pound gorilla.
Cranfield has been appointed director of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, a part-time post overseeing international efforts to save Africa's mountain gorilla, the largest and most endangered of the world's great apes.
The Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project was set up in 1985 at the suggestion of naturalist Dian Fossey to save the mountain gorillas, whose numbers in Rwanda and bordering countries have dwindled to 640.
Cranfield, 46, of Butler was named to the post this month after an international search by an advisory committee of the Morris Animal Foundation, a Colorado-based group that funds the project.
"I like to think that we can make a difference," Cranfield said this week after examining a baby penguin at the zoo hospital, a one-story infirmary tucked in a corner of Druid Hill Park.
Cranfield said that the job will take about 15 percent of his time and that he will remain with the zoo, where he has been chief vet for 15 years.
Cranfield will travel to the project's clinic in Rwanda twice a year to supervise three veterinarians and six assistants who monitor and treat the gorillas that inhabit the Virungas, a curve of volcanoes that straddles the border between Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Their chores range from repairing gorilla limbs damaged by poacher traps to checking urine samples for signs of diabetes, or kidney and liver ailments.
Cranfield said he applied for the job after reading about it in a trade journal.
He attributed his hiring in part to his working relationships with medical experts at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he serves on the faculty, and at the National Institutes of Health, which is working with him on the penguin malaria vaccine.
"It's a real honor, but I think it was the ability to collaborate with other institutions and what we could offer being in Baltimore that attracted the foundation," Cranfield said.
Robert Hilsenroth, the executive director of the Morris Animal Foundation, said Cranfield had more than that going for him.
Hilsenroth said Cranfield was selected from a field of 10 highly regarded veterinarians around the world because of his experience as an administrator and his work with exotic wildlife overseas.
