How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog)

by Lee Alan Dugatkin

  They should always approach the foxes slowly, Nina decided, and should also open the cage slowly and reach into it slowly with some food held in the gloved hand. When they did, some of the foxes lunged at them. Most of them backed away and snarled and sneered menacingly. But about a dozen out of the hundred or so they tested each year were slightly less agitated. They certainly weren’t calm, but they weren’t highly reactive and aggressive either. A few would even take the food offered from the workers’ hands. These foxes that didn’t bite the hands that fed them became the parents of the next generation in Dmitri and Nina’s pilot work.

  Within three breeding seasons, Nina and her team were seeing some intriguing results. Some of the pups of the foxes they’d selected were a little calmer than their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. They would still sneer and react aggressively sometimes when their keepers approached them, but at other times, they seemed almost indifferent.

  Belyaev was delighted. The change in behavior was subtle, and in only a handful of foxes, but they had occurred in much less time than he had expected, the blink of time on the time scale of evolution. He was now intent on expanding the pilot program into a large-scale experiment. But doing so was outside the purview of his responsibilities at the Central Research Laboratory, so he would need the approval of his higher-ups. He could tell them he was attempting to breed foxes that had especially fine fur, and that could give birth more than once a year, as he had advised Sorokina and her team to do if they were ever questioned. But even so, a large endeavor at such a prominent institution, especially right on Lysenko’s Moscow home turf, ran the risk of reprisals.

  Getting started might not have to wait too much longer though. In March of 1953, Stalin had died, and the political winds were shifting. Lysenko had begun to lose his grip on power. Though Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was also a fan of Lysenko, he was promoting a revitalization of Soviet science, which included the reinstatement of some prominent geneticists, who had been toiling as the equivalent of laboratory technicians under Lysenko’s reign, back to their scientific posts. Another clear sign of changing winds was the government’s official rehabilitation of the reputation of Belyaev’s hero, Nikolai Vavilov.2 There was much catch-up work to do.

  Just the month before Stalin’s death, James Watson and Francis Crick had announced that they had solved the vexing mystery of the structure of DNA and cracked the genetic code. Displaying a massive model of the molecule, they revealed that it was shaped like a spiraling staircase, a structure that came to be called the double helix. DNA was like a microscopic computing machine, and this discovery at last offered a compelling explanation of how mutations happen; they must arise from errors made in the copying of the code.

  In light of this masterful explanation of the genetic code, Lysenko’s railings against “Western genetics” were exposed as, at best, ludicrously misinformed. On top of that, many efforts to improve crop yields using methods proposed by Lysenko had failed miserably. The yields of crops from seeds produced according to his recommendations had not increased. Many experiments with grafting had also been undertaken, as Lysenko had asserted that the combination of characteristics achieved by this method would be inherited in the offspring of those hybrids. This had also proved unfounded. By stark contrast, Western scientists were producing bumper crops with their “bourgeois” genetic breeding technique of creating corn hybrids, a method Russian scientists were experimenting with in the 1930s until Lysenko had clamped down on the work.

  The Soviet genetics community rallied. The leading figures in Soviet genetics, from the period of Lysenko’s rise, began a bold charge in an open power struggle with the Lysenkoists. At the same time, Dmitri was gaining increasing respect in the Russian scientific community, particularly for the stunning results he was continuing to achieve in breeding beautiful animals with valuable furs. In particular, mink was becoming increasingly popular, and Belyaev had produced some glamorous new varieties of fur at the Central Research Laboratory, with gorgeous colorings of cobalt blue, sapphire, topaz, beige, and pearl. He had also written an impressive scientific paper that set forth his explanation of why some foxes had developed the white patches on their faces, due to genes that had been inactive being reactivated to produce the patches in a new location.

  As word of his achievements spread, Dmitri received many invitations to lecture. His youthful energy, his eloquence, and his good looks and confidence charmed his audiences. Many who attended his lectures recall that when he walked up to a podium, he immediately commanded the whole room’s attention, no matter how big the lecture hall was. Some say he possessed an almost mystical ability to sense the thoughts and mood of a crowd and to establish a strong connection with every person in the room.

  On one occasion in particular, in 1954, the force of his presence and the strength of his scientific integrity made a powerful impression on the elite of the Soviet scientific community. As part of his struggle to maintain his power, Lysenko and his henchman had organized a series of lectures specifically to discredit Belyaev. They were held at the cavernous central lecture hall at the Polytechnical Museum in Moscow, one of the most prestigious venues for scientific lectures.

  Dmitri was scheduled to speak, and the hall was packed for his talk. The atmosphere was electric. The crowd knew that Lysenko’s cronies’ purpose in inviting Belyaev to speak was to ridicule him. One of Lysenko’s favored tactics was to send his minions to the public lectures of his targets to shout them off the stage with denunciations. Many lectures had famously devolved into raucous shouting matches as defenders volleyed back.

  When the door to the stage opened, Dmitri strode briskly out carrying a heap of gorgeous fox and mink furs, which he draped over the lectern. As a colleague in the room that day recalled, he understood very well the effect he would achieve with this stunning visual display of his expertise. The hall fell utterly silent, and Belyaev began to speak in a deeply resonant voice. Natalia Delaunay, in the audience that day, recalled that his voice “was like a human orchestra,” comparing his lecture to “a piece written for the organ.”

  Commanding the room, his head held proudly, his eyes locked onto those of his listeners, and they were riveted. Genetics was still an officially prohibited science, but Dmitri pulled no punches in sharing his discoveries about the genetics of breeding. He was not afraid of Lysenko and he was openly defying him. It was Belyaev who would do the ridiculing that day. And after that, he felt that he could speak openly about his disgust for what Lysenko had done to Soviet science, though he knew that those who would work with him could not.

  Such respect did Belyaev command that, just a few years later, he was appointed to a high-level position that allowed him to launch the large-scale fox domestication experiment he’d dreamed of. In 1957, Nikolai Dubinin, a vocal opponent of Lysenko, was made Director of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics, one of many institutes being established as part of a gigantic scientific research center, called Akademgorodok, or “academic city.” Dubinin tapped Belyaev to leave Moscow and open an evolutionary genetics lab at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics.

  Part of the new push to reinvigorate Soviet science, Akademgorodok was being constructed near the large industrial city of Novosibirsk in the middle of Siberia’s “Golden Valley,” so called because of its abundance of natural resources. The popular concept of Siberia is of a frigid wasteland, covered in a thick blanket of snow, and it’s true that the winters are brutal, with temperatures often lingering at 40 degrees below zero, but the spring and summer seasons in the Golden Valley are warm and sunny. And while vast swathes of Siberia are desolate, only dotted with tiny villages here and there, Novosibirsk was one of the largest cities in the Soviet Union, with a population close to a million, which made it a good location for a scientific hub that needed many support workers for secretarial and custodial work. As for the scientists, they would be shipped in.

  Decades earlier Maxim Gorky had written of a fictional “Tow
n of Science . . . a series of temples in which every scientist is a priest . . . where scientists every day fearlessly probe deeply into the baffling mysteries surrounding our planet.” Musing of such an oasis, Gorky envisioned “foundries and workshops where people forge exact knowledge, facet the entire experience of the world, transforming it into hypotheses, into instruments for the further quest of the truth.”3

  Akademgorodok was to be such a place.

  The city would house tens of thousands of researchers and would become a flourishing community of scientific comrades who would bring Soviet science to world preeminence. Not even Siberia’s agonizing winters could blunt the appeal of this scientific Babylon, 2,000 miles away from Moscow and what remained of Lysenko’s dwindling powerbase. Researchers, both senior and junior, from all over the Soviet Union, flocked there. They did so eagerly. It was a startling shift from the journey into obscurity, and often prison, that many persecuted scientists took during Lysenko’s heyday. Now they would preside over a rebirth of science at a new scientific utopia that had been built in the most unlikely of places.

  Soon after appointing Belyaev to head up the Institute’s evolutionary genetics lab, Dubinin quickly promoted him to deputy director of the Institute. Dmitri would now be able to launch the full-scale fox experiment, and even before he left Moscow for Akademgorodok, he began setting the work in motion. Soon, though, he would learn that he would still need to do so cautiously.

  Lysenko and his allies were furious that although they were still officially in power, geneticists on the ground were starting to simply ignore their prohibitions. They launched a new rear-guard campaign against genetics, and as part of this new battle, in January 1959, a Lysenko-created committee from Moscow arrived in Novosibirsk and visited Akademgorodok.4 This committee had the official authority to determine what work was done at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics and who was in charge, and Belyaev and the whole research staff were at risk of being forced out. Institute scientists recall that committee members “were snooping in the laboratories,” questioning everyone and anyone, including secretaries, and the word spread that the committee was clearly unhappy that genetic studies were being conducted. When the Lysenko-stacked committee met with Mikhail Lavrentyev, chief of all the institutes at Akademgorodok, they informed him that “the direction of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics is methodologically wrong.” Those were ominous words from a Lysenkoist group, and everyone knew it.

  Nikita Khrushchev, who was by this time Premier of the USSR, heard tell of the committee’s report about its visit to Akademgorodok. Khrushchev had been a long-time supporter of Lysenko, and he decided to examine the situation personally, visiting Novosibirsk in September 1959. Khrushchev’s temper often got the best of him when things did not go exactly as he ordered, and the building of Akademgorodok was a large enough project that things were not going exactly as he wanted. Indeed, he threatened to disband the whole Soviet Academy of Sciences if the situation did not improve: “I’ll let you all loose!” Khrushchev railed. “I’ll deprive you [of] extra pay and all privileges! Peter the Great needed an academy, what do we need it for?”5

  The staff of all the science institutes at Akademgorodok gathered in front of the Institute of Hydrodynamics for Khrushchev’s visit, and one researcher recalls that the Premier “walked by the assembled staff very fast, not paying any attention to them.” The substance of the meeting between Khrushchev and administrators was not recorded, but accounts from the time make clear that the Institute of Cytology and Genetics would likely have been shut down by Khrushchev if his daughter, Rada, who had accompanied her father on parts of this trip, had not intervened. A well-known journalist, Rada, who was also a trained biologist, recognized Lysenko for the fraud he was, and convinced her father to keep the Institute open.

  But Khrushchev decided he had to do something to show his discontent, so the day after his visit, he had Dubinin, the head of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics, sacked. As deputy director, Belyaev was promoted to take charge. Dmitri was daunted by the prospect of replacing a man as esteemed as Dubinin. But he believed in seizing opportunities even when, indeed especially when, they were challenging, and this would allow him to ensure that top-rate genetics research was conducted. A colleague and friend of his recalls that years later, when he suggested that she take charge of one of the labs at the Institute, she had told him, “I can’t, I can’t.” She was afraid to follow in the steps of her predecessor, a woman with a stellar reputation. Belyaev told her, “Forget this expression: ‘I can’t.’ If you want to do science, you must forget this. Do you think it was easy for me to be appointed director of this Institute after Dubinin?”6 He took the reins, and shortly thereafter, he went in search of the person he would need to take charge of the running of his dream experiment.

  “DEEP INSIDE MY SOUL,” SAYS LYUDMILA TRUT, “is a pathological love for animals.” She inherited this from her mother, who was a great dog lover. Lyudmila had grown up with dogs as pets, and even during WWII, when food was horribly scarce, her mother would feed starving stray dogs, telling her, “If we don’t feed them, Lyudmila, how will they survive? They need people.” Following her mother’s example Lyudmila always carries some kind of treat in a pocket in case she encounters a stray dog. And she’s never forgotten that domesticated animals need people. She knew that this is how we’ve designed them.

  To follow her passion for animals, Lyudmila decided to study physiology and animal behavior, and as a top young student, she was admitted to the most prestigious program in that area in the Soviet Union, at Moscow State University, also one of the top universities in the world. Lyudmila had received the highest caliber of training of precisely the kind needed by the person who would run Belyaev’s experiment. Animal behavior was an area of research with an illustrious history in Russia, and Lyudmila had learned from professors who had worked with legends.

  Ivan Pavlov won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his work on how to condition or shape behavior. Russia’s first Nobelist, Pavlov showed that if dogs were always fed immediately after their keepers rang a bell, they would become conditioned to salivate at the sound of the bell, even if no food was provided. Pavlov theorized that this was a subconscious process, as opposed to a matter of conscious anticipation that food would soon be coming. His work was the foundation of the science that came to be known as behaviorism, which emphasized the effects of an animal’s environment on its behavior over the role of genes in behavior. Behaviorists who followed in Pavlov’s tradition included American B. F. Skinner, whose work with rats became well known in the West.

  Less known was the pioneering Russian work in ethology, the study of animal behavior, which was led by naturalist Vladimir Wagner and his followers in the early twentieth century. They built upon one of Charles Darwin’s core assertions, that much of animal behavior was the result of the process of natural selection. Lyudmila studied at Moscow State University, home institution to Leonid Krushinsky, one of the leading researchers who had furthered this work, and whose own work focused on the question of whether animals could think. Krushinsky was a pioneering researcher, and though he believed that genes played a powerful role in animals’ behavior, he was also greatly influenced by Ivan Pavlov’s work. He combined insights from both behaviorism and genetics in his research, and he advanced the view that some animals were capable of learning and elementary reasoning, and not just ruled by either genes or conditioning.

  Krushinsky was inspired to study animal reasoning by observations he made of what he called animals’ “extrapolation ability,” by which they were able to discern where prey they were chasing had moved in order to evade them. On many trips observing animals in the wild, Krushinsky had brought his beloved dog along, and one day he observed the dog pursuing a quail into a bush. Because the bush was too thick for the dog to reach into, the dog had circled around the bush to wait for the bird to appear out of the other side. Krushinsky believed this indicated that his dog—and he was to observe t
his in many other animals as well—could anticipate future actions in a way that required simple reasoning. Animals must learn to extrapolate this way from experience, and surely that meant that animal behavior was shaped both by animals’ genes and their life experiences and environment.7

  As a keen investigator of the evolution of animal behavior, Krushinsky had conducted systematic comparisons of the thinking abilities of wolves versus those of dogs, claiming that the process of domestication had made dogs less intelligent. He theorized that this could have been due to the lack of survival pressure dogs were under, while wolves still needed to be constantly vigilant—keeping their wits about them, as it were—in order to survive. Since then, it has been demonstrated that dogs are actually no less intelligent than their wild cousins, and in fact have a far more diverse repertoire of behaviors than wolves or wild dogs can develop, since their lack of fear of humans allows them to adapt more readily to a complex environment.

  Krushinsky also studied a host of other creatures, and extensively documented that many have complex social lives as well as problem-solving abilities. He conducted an astonishing range of fascinating studies in the field. In one paper, he wrote of his observations of the way the Great Spotted Woodpecker uses trees as tools: The birds insert pine cones into holes in trees that are just the right size to act as a kind of vise to hold the cones while they peck the seeds out of them. Although many behaviorists discounted the existence of animal emotions, and pushed the study of them to the fringe, Krushinsky wrote forthrightly about feelings he observed in animals. About African hunting dogs, for example, he noted that they live in what he called communities that are maintained by “friendly relationships.”

  Belyaev was friends with Krushinsky and admired his work, and because the fox experiment would require the kind of sophisticated observation of animal behavior Krushinksy taught, Dmitri visited him at his office at Moscow State’s Sparrow Hill campus for advice about researchers who might be able to take charge of the daily running of the fox experiment. Ensconced in the grand setting of Krushinsky’s building, with its palatial ceilings, marble floors, ornate columns, and fine art statues, Dmitri described his plans for the experiment and explained that he was looking for talented graduates to assist with the work. Krushinsky put the word out, and when Lyudmila heard about the opportunity, she was immediately captivated. Her own undergraduate work had been on the behavior of crabs, and as fascinating as their complex behavior could be, the prospect of working with foxes, so closely related to her beloved dogs, and with such a well-respected scientist as Belyaev, was tantalizing. She wanted in.