FOR YEARS DMITRI TOYED WITH HOW TO SET UP AN INDIRECT EXPERIMENT that would test his self-domestication hypothesis in humans. The idea would be to select a primate for tameness and see whether domestication followed. If it weren’t so fraught with ethical issues, it would, given a great deal of time and research funding, he thought, be possible to perform the equivalent of the fox experiment with chimpanzees. Chimps and humans share a recent common ancestor, as foxes and dogs do. If an experiment, similar to what he and Lyudmila were doing with the foxes, selected the tamest chimps in every generation to mate with one another, how domesticated might they become? As a brilliant geneticist and evolutionary biologist he knew humans didn’t evolve from chimps—we just share a common ancestor—and so he didn’t think chimp domestication would replay human evolution per se, but instead might provide some hints on the role of domestication in our own evolutionary history.
Dmitri knew that performing such an experiment was out of bounds, and he never took any concrete steps to explore the possibilities. But he did talk with friends and family about the idea. Pavel Borodin, of the rat domestication experiment, remembers a meeting where Belyaev brought up the chimpanzee idea. “We were rarely surprised by anything Dmitri said,” Pavel says, “but this took our breath away.” After discussing the idea for a bit, Pavel said, “Dmitri, do you understand what you’re starting? Don’t we have enough of our own problems . . . ? Do we really need to look at ourselves in the mirror?” Dmitri paused and told him, “You’re right, absolutely right. But it is interesting, is it not?”16
Belyaev’s son Nikolai recalls another occasion, when a colleague responded with shock to the very notion, saying, “It will take at least 200 years, so we will not know the results. Even if you are right, which is unlikely, what about the ethical issues?” Dmitri, who had little tolerance for shortsighted thinking, replied, “You don’t see further than your nose. Certainly we wouldn’t see the results, but other people would.”17 Then again, he hadn’t expected to see results so quickly with the foxes, so who’s to say how quickly the changes of domestication might also emerge in chimps? That is one question to which Dmitri would not be able to find the answer.
In the early winter of 1985 Belyaev was hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia.18 He was placed in the intensive care unit, and initially, he was so weak that physicians wouldn’t even let his wife enter to see him. Only Dmitri’s younger son Misha, by now a physician himself, was permitted to visit. But, very slowly, he began to recover. And as he did, he expressed one wish: to be well enough to be able to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the defeat of the Germans in World War II, what Dmitri, like all in the Soviet Union, called the Great Patriotic War. He had never missed a Victory Day celebration before, and he had no intention of missing the one on May 9, 1985.
When Victory Day came, Dmitri gathered all the strength he had and walked up the steep flights of stairs to the hall where the celebration was taking place. When he entered the room, his friends and former brothers-in-arms—all of whom knew how sick he still was—gave him a standing ovation.19 It was one of the last truly joyful moments he would experience.
With his condition persisting, he was advised to go to Moscow for specialist care, and there he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. The habitual smoking had finally caught up with him. His physicians wanted to get him back to Novosibirsk immediately, so he could spend as much time as possible with his loved ones. As an Academician—a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences—he was entitled to a flight by a special military aircraft, which they arranged. But when he learned that the flight would cost a small fortune, he had stopped the plan. No one, he believed, should have such a privilege above others. A regular flight back home would suffice.
For two months, he was still strong enough to communicate, but he was bedridden and frustrated that he could not continue with his work. “I need to work,” he told one of his doctors, “but everyone is fussing around, restricting me, giving me handfuls of pills.”20 He was allowed to stay in his home, with oxygen tanks brought in to support his failing lungs, and the close-knit community of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics gathered around him.
As the end neared, Dmitri arranged to give one last interview to the press. He used the opportunity to share his vision of the future. “Within a couple of decades,” he told the reporter, “humans will be able to fully study our planet to the very core . . . exploit the near-earth space . . . work for a long period of time in zero gravity, and create around the earth, at its orbit, enclosed ecosystems. . . . All aspects of human activity will be successfully improved through . . . automation. We will see fifth and maybe sixth generation computers. These will be talking, thinking, and self-innovating machines. Personal computers, robots, and communication systems will be widely employed.” That much he felt certain about. “But what will become of humans,” he added, “I do not know.”
When the reporter followed up by asking him what he wished for mankind in the twenty-first century, Belyaev replied, “Be kind and socially responsible, strive for mutual agreement with all people, live in peace, carry a full and sincere responsibility for our ‘younger brothers’—all living creatures on earth. We should never forget that we are just part of nature, and we should live in harmony with nature when we study its laws and use this knowledge to our service.”21 Just as he had done.
On November 14, 1985, Dmitri Belyaev died, surrounded by loving friends and family, and secure in the knowledge that his life’s work would continue. He had trained the vice director of the Institute, Vladimir Shumny, well, and he was confident Shumny would take charge smoothly. Of course he knew that Lyudmila and the fox team would keep the domestication experiment going, and he was sure they would make many wonderful new discoveries.
He did have one regret. “He wanted to write a book,” Lyudmila says. “His greatest desire was to write a book on domestication . . . and the book was supposed to be popular . . . He wanted to tell stories, to tell the layman, anyone . . . what processes had underlain domestication,” Lyudmila continues, “why we have these animals living around us, why they are the way they are.” Belyaev had talked to Lyudmila and others about his dream of writing this book many times, but he had been most adamant about it when he learned of one special story about Pushinka. Many years earlier, Lyudmila had acted out, in vivid terms for Dmitri, how Pushinka, immediately after giving birth to her pups, had brought them to her and placed them at Lyudmila’s feet. “When I narrated that nice story to Belyaev,” she says, “he was so surprised, he was so perplexed, he was so intrigued, that he said that we should write a popular book to tell people . . . to make people understand domesticated animals . . . why [and how] they behave differently from their wild [ancestors].” He even had a name for the book: Man Is Making a New Friend.
The day of Belyaev’s funeral saw sleet, snow, and rain. Looking back on the ceremony, Dmitri’s family, friends, and colleagues have mixed feelings. All agree that the funeral, and the other ceremonies that were linked to it, garnered the attention that a man of Belyaev’s stature merited. The crowd was huge: a mixture of fellow scientists, staff from the Institute of Cytology and Genetics and many other institutes at Akademgorodok, family, friends, and former comrades from the Great Patriotic War. And then there were the dignitaries, both political and scientific, who came from as far away as Moscow. Many of them had never met Dmitri Belyaev, but they dominated the podium, giving the sort of laudatory eulogies that VIPs specialize in.
Respectful as all the speeches were, the staged, bureaucratic nature of the funeral left no time for friends and family to share their thoughts: they were not given any time to stand up and give their personal eulogies. That stung, and the anger and disappointment has stayed with them to this day. “I wanted to speak up,” Lyudmila says, but protocol just didn’t allow it. She and others could stand and watch. But after all was said and done, something happened that refreshed their spirits. A woman approached Lyudmila and those aro
und her. The woman was weeping as she said, “You don’t know to whom you are saying good-bye for good today.” Lyudmila and the others were taken aback. “What do you mean we don’t know him?” Lyudmila said. “We have known him for more than 20 years!” To which the woman replied, “Perhaps you have known him for 20 years, but, you don’t know what sort of man that man was.” And then she told a story that no one there ever forgot.
She had been a bank teller. Years earlier she had suffered from severe pain in her legs. One day, Belyaev was in the bank when he overheard a conversation between this woman and a colleague of hers. The teller was describing the pain in her legs, and how she wasn’t sure how much longer she could even keep her job in the face of this daily pain. What would happen to her and her family then? Her colleague told her that she needed to visit a doctor immediately. “I have been to all the doctors,” the teller replied, “but they are not helpful. I want to be put in hospital, but they say there are not enough beds. I don’t know what to do: no one does.” Belyaev listened, finished the work that brought him to the bank, and left. Two days later the woman received a call while at work. The voice on the other end told her that there was a room available for her in the hospital and that she should proceed there as soon as possible. Shocked, the teller said, “That is impossible, I have been told many times there are no beds for me.” That might be, said the caller, but we have been contacted by Academician Belyaev and he has asked that we remedy this situation. The woman went to the hospital, underwent a successful series of surgeries, and soon returned to her teller job pain free. Belyaev, as was his nature, never mentioned a word of this to anyone.
8
An SOS
The year of Dmitri Belyaev’s death, 1985, ushered in a period of great tumult in the Soviet Union. The top-down communist system was entering its death throes. When Mikhail Gorbachev became secretary general in March, he implemented the policies known as glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), intended to make the Soviet government more transparent and the economy more efficient. Instead, they sent the system into shock. The economic restructuring Gorbachev instituted led to massive shortages of goods from oil to bread and butter, and strict rationing was instituted. The Soviet people found themselves waiting in long lines for even the most basic essentials.
For a time, the scientific work of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics was protected from the economic upheaval, and Lyudmila was able to continue operations as normal at the fox farm. The new director, Vladimir Shumny, appreciated the importance of the fox experiment and made sure it was as well funded as possible. Lyudmila took over all responsibility for the running of the experiment. She missed Dmitri terribly, and thought about him every day as she arrived at her office to pore through some new data about the foxes or as she checked in on the new generation of pups, whom he would have loved visiting. Working hard to keep his spirit of scientific exploration alive with her team at the farm, she launched several important new studies.
The number of pups born each year who displayed most or all of the elite traits increased at a quickening pace in the 1980s, so that by mid-decade, out of about 700 foxes on the farm, between 70% to 80% were in the elite category. Additional changes in both their looks and their behavior also emerged. In addition to more of the foxes having curly tails, their tails were also becoming bushier. Many of the foxes also began to vocalize in an odd new way, making a high-pitched “haaaaaw, haaaaaw, haw, haw, haw” sound when people approached them. Lyudmila thought it sounded like they were laughing and called it the “ha ha” vocalization. She was also now sure that the foxes’ anatomy was changing. There was no longer any question that the snouts of many of the foxes born in these generations were slightly shorter and more rounded, and their heads seemed to be somewhat smaller also. These changes in anatomy were significant enough now that Lyudmila decided the team should make measurements, to compare the snouts and heads of the elites to those of the control foxes.
Reading about the latest techniques in anatomy research, Lyudmila learned that ideally, they should take X-rays of the foxes’ heads and then make their measurements from those. But she didn’t have access to an X-ray machine, and though so far her budget for running the experiment hadn’t been slashed, she couldn’t allocate the resources for such an expensive purchase. So she and her team would have to do the work the old fashioned way, making direct measurements of the foxes. This was difficult and time-consuming work, which required the workers to help out again, holding the foxes still while Lyudmila and her research team measured the height and width of their skulls and the width and the shape of their snouts. Their arduous work paid off. They found that the skulls of tame foxes were significantly smaller than those of the control foxes, and the differences in the snouts were somewhat more pronounced, with those of the tame foxes being in fact considerably rounder and shorter than those of the control foxes. These same changes were involved in the evolution of the dog from the wolf: the skulls of adult dogs are smaller than those in adult wolves and their muzzles are wider and rounder.1 These changes in anatomy were another way in which dogs, and now the tame foxes, retained more juvenile features as they matured. When Lyudmila had compiled all of the data and saw the stark differences, she thought to herself, Dmitri would have been pleased. These changes added to the domestication package; the tamest foxes were now displaying so many of the types of transformation seen in domesticated species.
Another study Lyudmila launched looked deeper into the changes in the level of stress hormones in the tame foxes. Instead of just measuring hormone levels in the foxes as they had done before, this time she and her colleagues Irena Plyusnina and Irena Oskina would experimentally manipulate the levels in order to see whether behavioral changes might result. They already knew that, compared to control foxes, the tame foxes had a significantly lower level of stress hormones after the point, about 45 days into development, when their production spikes up in wild foxes. They had subsequently found that in the aggressive foxes, the spike up in stress hormone levels was significantly higher than in the control foxes. Now, to produce definitive evidence that the behavioral differences between the two lines were due primarily to these different levels of stress hormones, Lyudmila decided to conduct a study to discover whether, if the level of stress hormones in the aggressive foxes was lowered, they would act tamer. It was now possible to experimentally block the spike up in production of the hormones in the aggressive foxes by feeding them a capsule filled with chloditane, a chemical that stops the production of some stress hormones.2 Lyudmila selected a number of pups whose mothers and fathers were aggressive, and Irena fed them the capsules starting just a little before the 45 day mark. Another group of pups from aggressive moms and dads served as a control group, and they were fed a capsule full of oil. The results were striking; the pups given the chloditane, who did not produce a surge of stress hormones, acted more like tame pups, while those fed the oil developed into normal aggressive adults.3
Lyudmila then decided to perform a similar experiment with serotonin levels, which she had found were so much higher in the tame foxes.4 In this case, starting when they were 45 days old, she would increase the amount of serotonin in the systems of one group of pups born to aggressive parents, while pups of aggressive parents in one control group would be given no injections and those in another control group would be injected with a solution of water and salt. Again, the results were crystal clear. The pups in both control groups developed into aggressive adults, while the pups given the extra serotonin did not: they acted more like tame foxes.5
From that day in May 1967 when Belyaev had called Lyudmila into his office to share his tour-de-force new idea, changes in hormone levels had been at the core of his theory of destabilizing selection. The results from this new manipulative work on stress hormones and serotonin fit in beautifully.
BY THE LATE 1980S, THE FOX domestication experiment was approaching age thirty, making it one of the longer ongoing experiments in anim
al behavior ever conducted. Then suddenly, it seemed that it would come to an abrupt and tragic end. The upheaval in the Soviet economy had intensified as the decade proceeded, and the Union had begun to crumble. So dire did the prospects of the fox farm become that Lyudmila and her team found themselves fighting desperately to keep the foxes alive.
In 1987, protests against Soviet control broke out in the Baltic republics of Latvia and Estonia and spread throughout the Union. In 1989, the pro-democracy Solidarity movement in Poland forced the Soviet government to allow free elections, and on November 9 of that same year, with massive crowds of pro-democracy protestors marching in East Berlin, the guards at the Berlin Wall stood down and crowds of revelers climbed atop the wall cheering. On October 3, 1990, East and West Germany were official reunited. In early December 1991, the Supreme Soviet renounced the treaty that had formally established the Union, and by December 21, fourteen of the fifteen Soviet republics had formerly withdrawn from the Union, and eleven had joined together creating the Commonwealth of Independent States. On December 25, Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down from the presidency, and the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin for the last time.
How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) Page 17
