DMITRI BELYAEV WAS NOT A MAN TO shy away from danger, and he understood how to use the considerable tools he had to negotiate the treacherous waters of Stalin’s rule. When World War II broke out, he immediately joined the Soviet army and fought valiantly against the Germans on the front, rising to the rank of major by war’s end, though he was only twenty-eight. Both his military service and his skill in fur breeding, producing gorgeous furs that fetched high prices, had won him the trust of his government superiors, and he had developed a reputation as both a first-rate scientist and a man who knew how to get things done. Dmitri also knew how to make good use of his considerable charm, and the mesmerizing effect he had on people, to burnish his reputation.
Belyaev was a strikingly handsome man, with a strong jaw, thick coal-black hair, and penetrating dark-brown eyes. His confidence and dignified bearing lent him a commanding presence, though he stood only five feet eight inches tall. No one who worked with him, or even just met him briefly, failed to comment about the extraordinary power of his eyes when asked to describe him. “When he was looking at you,” one colleague recalled, “he was looking through you, reading your mind. Some people didn’t like to go to his office, not because they had done something wrong or they were afraid of being punished. They were scared by his eyes, by his gaze.” Belyaev understood this effect well and he would often intently lock people in his gaze when he spoke with them. It seemed impossible to keep anything from him or to deceive him.
His demanding standards of excellence were profoundly inspiring for some of his scientific colleagues and those who worked for him, and many of them were intensely devoted to him. He gave them confidence and pushed them to do their best work, constantly probing into new avenues of inquiry with them. A believer in lively debate, he encouraged open discussion of alternative views, and he loved volleying ideas back and forth. Some of those who worked with him weren’t so enamored of his leadership, however, intimidated by his intensity and unbridled energy, while others feared his disdain for any shirking of responsibility or any sort of gossip or intrigue. He knew those he could expect first-rate work from and trust and those he could not. Nina Sorokina was one of those he could have faith in on both counts.
Disembarking from his long train journey to Tallinn, Dmitri boarded a local bus heading south, traveling roads so bumpy they barely merited the name, through many tiny villages. His destination was the little hamlet of Kohila, buried deep in the Estonian forest. Not so much a village as a corporate outpost, Kohila was typical of the dozens of these industrial-scale fur farms scattered across the region.2 Spread out over 150 acres, the farm housed about 1500 silver foxes in dozens of rows of metal-roofed long wooden sheds, each of which contained dozens of cages. The workers and their families lived a ten-minute walk away from the farm in a bare-bones settlement of drab housing units, a small school, a few shops, and a couple of social clubs.
Nina Sorokina struck a somewhat incongruous figure against the dreary backdrop of this remote outpost. She was a beautiful, dark-haired woman, also in her mid-thirties, keenly intelligent and intense about her work, commanding a powerful position for a woman in such a vital industry. A welcoming host, she enjoyed inviting Dmitri for tea in her office whenever he visited the farm. When he arrived after his long journey, they went right away to her office to talk in private. Over tea and cakes, with an ever-present cigarette dangling from his mouth, he told her what he was proposing—to domesticate the silver fox. She would not have been unreasonable to think her friend somewhat mad. Most of the foxes at the fur farms were so aggressive that when caretakers and breeders approached them, they bared their sharp canine teeth and lunged at them, snarling viciously. When foxes bite, they bite hard, and Nina and her team of breeders wore two-inch thick protective gloves that rode halfway up their forearms when they got anywhere near these animals. But Nina was intrigued, and she asked him why he wanted to attempt this.
He told her that he had been fascinated by the unanswered questions about domestication, and that he was especially taken by the puzzle as to why domesticated animals could breed more than once a year, but their wild ancestors rarely did. If he could domesticate foxes, they might also be able to breed more often, which would be very good for business. This answer was true, but it was also good cover for her and her breeding team. If anyone should ask what they were doing, they could say that they were studying fox behavior and fox physiology, which were acceptable areas of research to Lysenko, in order to see if they could increase fur quality and the number of pups born each year. How could the authorities object to that?
He didn’t want to put Nina at risk by explaining more. The full truth was that if the experiment worked, it might provide the answers to many important outstanding questions about domestication in all species. The more Belyaev had researched what was known about how animals had become domesticated, the more intrigued he had become by the mysteries about it, and those were mysteries that only an experiment of the kind he was proposing would be able to solve. How else could the answer to how domestication got started possibly be found? No written accounts of this first stage of the process were available. And though fossils of the early stages of domesticates such as dog-like wolves and early versions of domesticated horses had been found, they could reveal little about how the process got going in the first place. Even if remains could eventually be found that established what the first changes in animals’ physiology had been, that would not explain how and why they emerged.
A number of other puzzles about domestication also had not been solved. One was why so few animal species out of the millions on the planet had become domesticated—only a few dozen in all, most of which were mammals, but which also included a few species of fish and birds, and a few insects, including the silk moth and the honeybee. Then there was the question why so many of the changes that had taken place in domesticated mammals were so similar. As Darwin, one of Dmitri’s intellectual idols, had noted, most of them developed patches of different coloring in their fur and on their hides—spots, patches, blazes, and other markings. Many also retained physical characteristics from childhood well into their adulthood that their wild cousins outgrew, such as floppy ears, curly tails, and babyish faces—referred to as the neotonic features, those that make young animals of so many species so adorable. Why would these characteristics have been selected for by breeders? Farmers raising cows, after all, had nothing to gain from their cows having black-and-white spotted hides. Why would pig farmers have cared whether their pigs had curly tails?
Perhaps these changes in the animals’ characteristics had arisen not from the artificial selection process involved in breeding by humans, but through natural selection. After all, natural selection continues to operate on species after they’ve been domesticated, just to a lesser degree than in the wild. Animals in the wild develop all sorts of spots and stripes and other patterns in their fur and hides, which often serve the purpose of camouflaging them. The spots and patches domestic animals develop don’t play this camouflaging role, though, so why would selection favor them? There must be another answer.
Another commonality among domesticated animals concerns their mating abilities. All wild mammals breed within a particular window of time each year, and only once a year. For some, that window is as narrow as a few days and for others it’s weeks or even months. Wolves, for example, breed between January and March. The window for foxes is from January to late February. This time of year corresponds to the optimal conditions for survival; the young are born when the temperature, the amount of light, and the abundance of food offer them the best odds for a successful launch into the world. With many domesticated species, by contrast, mating can occur any time during the year and for many, more than once. Why had domestication led to such a profound change in the reproductive biology of animals?
Belyaev thought the answer to all of the puzzling questions about domestication had to do with the essential defining characteristic of all domesticated animals—th
eir tameness. He believed that the process of domestication was driven by our ancestors selecting animals according to this one key trait—that they were less aggressive and fearful toward humans than was typical for their species. This characteristic of tameness would have been the essential requirement for working with the animals in order to breed them for other desirable traits. Humans needed their cows, horses, goats, sheep, pigs, dogs, and cats to be nice and gentle toward their masters, regardless of what they were trying to get from them—milk, meat, protection, or companionship. It wouldn’t do to be trampled by their food or maimed by their protectors.
Belyaev explained to Nina that in his work in fox and mink breeding he had noted that while most of the minks and foxes on the fur farms were either quite aggressive or were nervous and fearful towards people, a few were quite calm when people approached them. They weren’t bred to be calm, so the quality must have been part of the natural behavioral variation in a population. This, he posited, would have been true for the ancestors of all domesticates. And over evolutionary time, as our early ancestors had begun raising them and selecting for this innate tameness, the animals became more and more docile. He thought that all of the other changes involved in domestication had been triggered by this change in the behavioral selection pressure for tameness. Rather than either avoidance of humans or aggression towards them giving them the survival advantage, now being calm around humans gave them the edge. The animals living in human contact had more reliable access to food and were better protected from predators. He wasn’t sure yet how selection for tameness would have caused all the genetic changes that must have happened in the animals, but he had conceived of an experiment he hoped would eventually provide the answer.
Nina was all ears. She had also observed that some foxes, though very few, were quite calm when approached, and she was intrigued by his theory. Belyaev explained the procedure he wanted Nina and her breeding team to follow. Every year, they should choose a few of the calmest foxes at Kohila at the breeding time in late January and mate them with one another. From the pups that those select foxes produced they should again choose the calmest ones and breed them. The change from generation to generation might be subtle, he noted, even difficult to identify at first glance, but they should just use their best judgment. Perhaps, he suggested, this method would eventually lead to calmer and calmer foxes, the first step in domestication.
Dmitri suggested that Nina and her breeders assess calmness by observing closely how the foxes responded when they approached their cages or put their hands up in front of them. They might even try putting a sturdy stick slowly through the bars of the cage to see whether the foxes attacked it or held back. But he would leave it up to them to work out their methods; he was confident in Nina’s judgment. Nina, in return, had faith that Dmitri’s idea was worth pursuing.
Before she agreed, he wanted to discuss the risks. He knew Nina understood the danger of conducting an experiment in the genetics of domestication under Lysenko, but he nonetheless emphasized to her that she must carefully consider the issue. He told her it was probably a good idea not to mention the work to others, except her team, and he offered his suggestion that if she were asked about what they were doing, she could say that the purpose of the experiment was simply to see if they could increase fur quality and the number of pups born each year.
Without a moment’s pause, Nina told him she would help him. She and her team would begin right away.
NINA’S AGREEMENT TO HELP WITH THE EXPERIMENT meant a great deal to Belyaev. This work, he hoped, could be the beginning of important research, which, if he was right about domestication, might even lead to breakthrough findings. It would also be keeping the tradition of such pathbreaking work in Soviet genetics alive, which was an urgent mission for him.
Dmitri believed that his generation of researchers must revive that tradition. This experiment, he felt sure, was the best way in which he could do his part. He and his fellow geneticists couldn’t allow Lysenko and his gang to hold back serious work any longer. Before long, scientists in the West were sure to crack the genetic code, figuring out how genes were constructed and how they sent messages to the cells that determined virtually everything about how animals developed and how day-to-day life is governed. Soviet geneticists must contribute to this new scientific revolution. It was time to build anew on the pioneering work in genetics that his older brother and so many of his scientific heroes had sacrificed their careers, and sometimes their lives, for.
One of those pioneers who had given their lives for the cause of genetics was a particular inspiration to Dmitri in studying domestication. Nikolai Vavilov greatly furthered our understanding of plant domestication and was also one of the world’s most important botanical explorers. He traveled to some sixty-four countries collecting seeds that were vital sources of food for the world—and for Russia. In his lifetime alone, three terrible famines in Russia killed millions of people and Vavilov had dedicated his life to finding ways to propagate crops for his country. He had started collecting seeds in 1916 and his work represented a high standard of research and perseverance that Dmitri hoped to honor. Vavilov had suffered what might have been a crushing loss right at the start of his career. Returning from England during World War I, where he had studied with some of the world’s leading geneticists, armed with a treasury of plant samples he planned to use in his research, his ship struck a German mine and was sunk. All the plants were lost.
Undeterred, Vavilov launched into a new research program, searching for crop varieties that were less susceptible to disease. In time, he collected domesticated plants from all around the world, which ultimately took him to the most remote jungles, forests, and mountains looking for the birthplaces of domesticated species.3 Reputed to sleep only four hours a night, he apparently used the extra time to write more than 350 papers and numerous books, as well as to master more than a dozen languages. He wanted to be able to talk with local farmers and villagers so that he could learn everything they knew about the plants he was studying.
Vavilov’s collecting adventures are the stuff of legend and began with a journey to Iran and Afghanistan, followed by visits to Canada and the United States in 1921; Eritrea, Egypt, Cyprus, Crete, and Yemen in 1926; and China in 1929.4 On his first trip, he was arrested at the Iran-Russia border and accused of being a spy, because he had a few German textbooks with him. In the Palmir region of central Asia, he was abandoned by his guide, ditched from his caravan, and attacked by robbers. On a trip to the border of Afghanistan, when he fell as he was stepping between two train cars, he was left dangling by his elbows as the train roared along. On a trip to Syria he contracted malaria and typhus, but carried on. One of his biographers wrote of his superhuman intensity, “For six weeks he did not even take off his overcoat. During the day he travelled and collected. When night came he flung himself on to the floor of some native hut. . . . Dysentery afflicted him throughout his expedition but he returned with several thousand specimens.”5 Indeed, he collected more live plant specimens than any man or woman in history, and he set up hundreds of field stations for others to continue his work. His vast collection of plant species allowed him to identify eight centers of world plant domestication; in southwestern Asia, southeastern Asia, the Mediterranean, Ethiopia, Abyssinia, the Mexican-Peruvian region, the Chiloe archipelago (near Chile), the border of Brazilian and Paraguay, and one island center, near Indonesia.
Vavilov had actually befriended the young Lysenko in the 1920s, when Lysenko received national acclaim for conducting research to help increase crop yields, a mission that was so important to Vavilov. So taken by Lysenko’s claims for his research in plant breeding was Vavilov at first that he went so far as to nominate him for membership in the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Lysenko’s claims about improving crop yields were also what, tragically, brought him to Stalin’s attention. His rise to power over Soviet science is a story worthy of Dmitri’s beloved Pushkin.
It all started when, in
the mid-1920s, the Communist Party leadership elevated a number of uneducated men from the proletariat into positions of authority in the scientific community, as part of a program to glorify the “average man” after centuries of monarchy had perpetuated wide class divisions between the wealthy and the workers and peasants. Lysenko fit the bill perfectly, having been raised by peasant farmer parents in the Ukraine.6 He hadn’t even learned to read until he was thirteen, and he had no university degree, having studied at what amounted to a gardening school, which awarded him a correspondence degree.7 The only training he had in crop breeding was a brief course in cultivating sugar beets.8 In 1925, he landed a middle-level job at the Gandzha Plant Breeding Laboratory in Azerbaijan, where he worked on sowing peas. Lysenko convinced a Pravda reporter9 who was writing a puff piece about the wonders of peasant scientists10 that the yield from his pea crop was far above average, and that his technique could help feed his starving country. The glowing article the reporter wrote claimed “the barefoot professor Lysenko has followers . . . and the luminaries of agronomy visit . . . and gratefully shake his hand.”11 The article was pure fiction. But it propelled Lysenko to national attention, including that of Josef Stalin.
Lysenko claimed to have conducted a set of experiments in which grain crops, including wheat and barley, produced much higher yields during stretches of cold weather after their seeds were frozen in water before planting. This method, he said, could quickly double the yield of farmlands in the Soviet Union in just a few years. In truth, Lysenko never undertook any legitimate experiment on increased crop yield. Any “data” he claimed to have produced he simply fabricated.
With Stalin as his ally, he launched a crusade to discredit work in genetics, in part, because proof of the genetic theory of evolution would expose him as a fraud. He railed against geneticists, both in the West and in the Soviet Union, as subversives, to Stalin’s great pleasure. At an agricultural conference held at the Kremlin in 1935, when Lysenko finished a fire-spitting speech in which he called geneticists “saboteurs,” Stalin rose to his feet and yelled, “Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, bravo.”12
How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) Page 2