The top-down command and control system that had overseen every aspect of life in the Union fell into chaos, and funding to agencies and institutes of all kinds either ceased or was drastically cut. The budget of every institute in Akademgorodok was slashed. Most labs still had some stores of equipment and materials with which to continue at least some research, but the fox farm faced an immediate crisis. Lyudmila was left with virtually no funds to pay the workers and little to buy food for the foxes. At this time, the population of foxes still sat at around 700 animals, and their food alone was a considerable expense.
She had to announce to the staff, who cared so much for the foxes and had been so dedicated to helping with the research, that she could no longer afford to pay them. Some stayed on anyway. They couldn’t bear to leave Lyudmila or their friends the foxes. Lyudmila asked those who felt they had no choice but to look for other work to please come back after she had somehow found funding again. “We told them,” she recalls, “when we are more or less okay again, please come back, we need you.” In the meantime, caring for the foxes and fighting to keep them alive became her all-consuming passion.
The director of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics squeezed all the money he could out of his budget to send Lyudmila. The fox experiment was the Institute’s greatest achievement. As Lyudmila says, it “became the ‘business card’ of the Institute,” spreading the word of the excellence of work at the Institute to the world genetics community. Lyudmila sent a grant for funding to the Siberian Academy of Sciences, and recognizing the importance of the experiment, the Academy provided some money. The new funding allowed Lyudmila to feed the foxes, but research work had to be put on hold. Then, in 1998, the bottom dropped out of the Russian economy. A severe economic crisis led to the devaluation of the ruble on the world market and then, in August, Russia defaulted on its public debt,6 which caused a severe currency shortage. Funding for government-run enterprises of all kinds dried up completely, and Lyudmila was left with virtually no money at all coming in for the fox farm. She and all those at the farm who loved the foxes so much now faced the horrifying prospect that they might not be able to keep the foxes alive.
The farm had some store of food, and Lyudmila had squirreled away a little money over the years from grants that allowed her to continue to buy some food and medicines that were critical to stopping the spread of disease, such as the fox version of hepatitis and any number of gut parasites that infect them. When that dried up she and a few colleagues at the Institute did everything they could think of to raise funds to buy as much food as they could afford. But it wasn’t nearly enough to keep the foxes fully fed and they began to lose weight. Lyudmila was so desperate to somehow stop the foxes—her foxes—from starving that she went out to the roads around the farm and the Institute and stopped cars, asking people for money or any kind of food at all they could give.
Lyudmila decided she had to make a plea about the foxes and the dire straits they were in. She sat down to write an article all about the experiment, and to send an SOS to both the scientific community and the broad public for support. Perhaps they would send help. “Forty years into our unique lifelong experiment,” Lyudmila wrote, “we believe that Dmitry Belyaev would be pleased with its progress. . . . Before our eyes, ‘the Beast’ has turned into ‘Beauty.’”7 She described the full cascade of changes they had seen in the foxes, explaining what loveable and loyal animals they had become. “I have raised several fox pups in domestic conditions,” Lyudmila wrote. “They have shown themselves to be good-tempered creatures . . . as devoted as dogs but as independent as cats, capable of forming deep-rooted pair bonds with human beings—mutual bonds.” You know these animals, Lyudmila was telling her audience, they’re just like the pets you have in your homes, the pets that you love and that your kids love. She also called out the many avenues of continuing investigation. Analysis of the foxes’ genomes had yet to be done, they still needed a much deeper understanding of how some of the foxes had reproduced more than once a year, they had started to hear new vocalizations in the tame foxes and wanted to know why, and they had only just started working on cognition in these special animals. And at the broadest level, though they had been at this now for forty years, that was just the blink of an eye in evolution—how far could they take domestication of the tamed fox, given more time?
She closed with a forthright assessment of how stark the situation had become, but she didn’t actually ask for support. “For the first time in 40 years, the future of our domestication experiment is in doubt,” she wrote. After describing the dire plight, she ended by announcing that she hoped to someday make elite pups available for people to adopt as house pets.
She sent the article off to one of the leading popular science magazines in the US, American Scientist, along with a number of photographs of the foxes showing how dog-like and affectionate they were, including one of Dmitri sitting with a group of pups playing around his feet and jumping up to lick his hands. She hoped the editors would understand the value of keeping the foxes alive and print it soon.
Despite all her efforts, as winter approached, foxes began to die. Some were felled by disease, but most died of starvation. She and her research team and the workers who had stayed on to keep the cages clean and offer any care at all they could, agonized as the population dwindled. To her horror, Lyudmila was faced with the excruciating proposition that the only way she could find funds to prevent the wholesale death of the foxes was to begin sacrificing some of them, in order to sell their pelts. She instructed that they be euthanized at the farm, to die in a peaceful manner, rather than be taken away. She chose mostly foxes from the aggressive and control populations for this, selecting those who were in the worst health and closest to death, shielding the tame animals from this awful fate to the extent possible. Making these selections was the hardest thing Lyudmila had ever had to do, and she finds it extremely difficult to discuss this horrible time still today. Some of the caretakers and researchers were so deeply traumatized by this turn of events that they needed counseling, and one worker completely broke down and had to be treated in a psychiatric ward.
By early 1999, only 100 tame females and thirty tame males were still alive, and even fewer aggressive and control foxes. Lyudmila now felt the only hope was that her article would appear in American Scientist and people would be moved to help. Day after agonizing day passed with no word, until one day she was elated to discover that she had received word from the magazine’s editor. With great trepidation, she read it, and the news was good—the article had been accepted.
Titled Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment, the article appeared in the March/April issue in 1999, displaying several of the photos Lyudmila had sent, including one of Dmitri with the pups, and one of a researcher holding a fox that was licking her face. When later she got the word that longtime New York Times science writer Malcom Browne had written an article in the Times telling the story of the foxes and referring to her plea, she felt a rush of hope. But Lyudmila worried that perhaps she was simply dreaming, grasping at straws. Would people respond? Would anyone actually send support? She worried, she recalls, “Maybe I was wrong about how others would feel.”
She wasn’t wrong. The response was heartwarming. Animal lovers all around the world heard her call, and letters immediately flooded in. “I was alarmed by your final paragraph,” one man wrote. “Is it possible for a private American citizen to make a direct contribution to your center? I cannot afford very much, but I would be willing to invest a small amount to make a statement of my support.”8 Another man, an offshore oil driller, wrote, “I cannot afford a lot but I can help . . . Please send me a way to donate.”9 Some people sent a few dollars, a few sent $10,000 or $20,000. Lyudmila was able to buy the foxes all the food and medicine they needed again, and to bring back some of the caretakers. The foxes, and the experiment, were saved.
The scientific community also rallied. The story of the foxes was the buzz at scient
ific conferences all over the world, the hot topic of discussion during coffee breaks between paper sessions. Geneticists and animal behaviorists realized that this extraordinary line of domesticated foxes could provide important clues not only about the genetics of domestication but also about the link between genes and behavior. There were so many potential avenues for investigation. The genome of the foxes could be sequenced, which the Institute of Cytology and Genetics did not yet have the technology or funding to do. More studies could be done to analyze the changes going on in their hormone production and the genetic causes of those changes. A new boom in the study of animal cognition and the nature of the animal mind was underway, and the cognitive abilities of the foxes would be a great topic for examination. Lyudmila began to receive inquiries from scientists abroad, and she opened the arms of the fox farm to them.
One of the first of many scientists to contact Lyudmila to explore doing research with her on the foxes was Russian-born geneticist Anna Kukekova, who had received her PhD from the University of St. Petersburg and then taken a position at Cornell University, studying the molecular genetics of dogs. Anna had first contacted Lyudmila in the early 1990s, as an undergraduate, hoping to do some work with the fox team, but the Institute was in the midst of the first economic pains then and couldn’t bring her in.
Anna’s strongest interest had always been in dogs and their relatives. When she was twelve, she had joined the Club of Young Zoologists at the Leningrad Zoo and when asked to choose a favorite animal to learn about, she selected the Australian dingo, because she was curious to understand what made these wild dogs behave differently from other dogs. Her passion had carried through to her graduate days, when, even as swamped as she was with her research on bacteria and viruses, she managed to find time to work as a dog trainer a few days per week.
After she got her degree, she searched for jobs in the emerging field of dog genetics. At the time, only a handful of labs were working on the dog genome, and Anna wrote to many of them. Greg Acland’s lab at Cornell had recently received a hefty grant, and he made her an offer. She left Russia for the pastoral hills of Ithaca, New York, in 1999.
It was an auspicious time to be diving into molecular genetics. The prior decade had been a watershed period for discovery in genetics, with powerful new tools for analysis of genes introduced and a rush of important findings. In 1983, scientists had mapped out the location of the first disease-causing genes in humans, the genes linked to Huntington’s disease, which were located on chromosome 4 in humans. That same year chemist Kary Mullis invented the technology for rapid replication of fragments of DNA known as the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), which would win him a Nobel Prize ten years later, for revolutionizing how quickly and how accurately genes can be mapped. By 1990, a key mutation in the gene associated with cystic fibrosis had been identified, and molecular genetics was hot on the trail of understanding how tumor suppressor genes went awry and led to breast cancer sites. The year 1990 also saw the start of the Human Genome Project, a monumental worldwide collaboration.
The first complete genome of any free-living species mapped was that of the bacteria Haemophilus influenzae, which despite its name does not cause flu, but does cause severe cold symptoms, especially in young children. Researchers found that its genetic code comprised 1.8 million letters, which suggested that the genetic codes of more complex species could be staggeringly long. The next year, the genome of the first fungus, popularly known as baker’s yeast because it is used to make bread dough rise, was mapped. Then, in 1996, to the delight of many, and the sheer horror of others, who thought science was now venturing into areas it had no business in, developmental biologist Ian Wilmut and his team at the Roslin Institute in Scotland took a mammary cell from one sheep, implanted it into the emptied-out egg of another sheep, and implanted the egg into yet a third sheep. On July 5, 1996, that sheep gave birth to the first sheep’s clone—6LL3, soon named Dolly at the suggestion of a Dolly Parton fan who helped deliver her. Princeton biologist Lee Silver summed up both the delight and the fear: “It’s unbelievable. It basically means that there are no limits. It means all of science fiction is true. They said it could never be done and now here it is, done before the year 2000.”10
The first complete sequence of an animal—the nematode C. elegans, a workhorse of medical genetics–was released in 1998, comprising 100 million letters of code. Then in 1999, less than five decades after Watson, Crick, and Rosalind Franklin had solved the puzzle of the structure of DNA, and nine years after the Human Genome Project was initiated, scientists in England, the United States, Japan, Germany, France, and China published the map of the first of our own 23 chromosomes. Human chromosome 22 was mapped out first because it was relatively small, and it had been linked to numerous diseases. Just two years later, a first draft of the human genome was published in rival papers in the world’s two leading journals, Science and Nature: one paper came from the Human Genome Project team and the other from Craig Venter’s team Celera Genomics. Francis Collins at the National Institutes of Health predicted this would eventually lead to “individual preventive medicine.” Two years later, the project was declared virtually complete, mapping out, letter by letter—about 3.2 billion of them—99% of our genes. Many compared it to the moon landing in terms of a triumph of human endeavor.11
In late fall of 2001, just as the first draft of the human genome was being released, Anna learned about Lyudmila’s American Scientist article and the foxes’ dire straits. She looked up all the articles that had come out over time about the experiment to learn more about the work that had been done with them since she had last heard about the experiment. Discovering that no gene sequencing work had yet been done with foxes, she wondered whether the tools she was using in mapping the dog genome could be modified to map the fox genome. Perhaps if she began to map the genome of the elite foxes, then one day—maybe even in just a few years—comparing it to the dog genome would produce important information. And the questions she could address were endless, given how little was known about the tame foxes’ genome.
Sequencing an individual gene, let alone being able to sequence a significant chunk of the entire genome of the elite foxes, was work that Lyudmila had thought would simply not be possible for her, or anyone, to perform for quite some time. To be able to then also compare the genome to that of the dog was a dream. Dog genomics was a new area of study, and very few researchers were trained in it at the time. But luckily Anna was one of them and she wanted to help usher Lyudmila and the foxes into this brave new world of discovery.
Anna proposed to her Cornell postdoctoral mentor Greg Acland that she call Lyudmila when she was over in Russia to spend the 2002 New Year’s holiday with her mother and grandmother, and see whether Lyudmila would agree to work with her on the project. Greg thought it was a great idea. So, shortly after Anna arrived back home in Moscow, she called Lyudmila, who was thrilled with the idea. Anna had assumed that if Lyudmila was amenable, then once she returned to Cornell, she and Greg would follow up with Lyudmila to work out the details. But when Lyudmila asked her what the first step should be, and Anna told her that it would be to get blood samples from the foxes, Lyudmila suggested that she fly to Novosibirsk—now. Lyudmila had not led the fox experiment so successfully for forty-plus years by letting opportunities pass her by.
Anna was stunned. Get started? Now? She had expected back-and-forth discussions for months. But Anna also knew how to capitalize on an opportunity. There was one catch, though. Anna would need at least 300 vials for the blood, but because such equipment was rare and expensive in Russia at the time, the Institute of Cytology and Genetics didn’t have them. She told Lyudmila she’d somehow get ahold of them. Calling old colleagues at the laboratory where she had done work at the University of St. Petersburg, Anna had the vials in hand in a couple of days. She flew to Novosibirsk on January 4.
Things continued to move at lightning speed. Within moments of Anna arriving in Lyudmila’s office at the In
stitute, Lyudmila said to her, “We do not have much time, let’s go to the farm.” Anna vividly remembers how astonished she was when she met the elite foxes. “To say that I was amazed interacting with the tame foxes is to say nothing,” she recalls. “I was amazed by the strength of the desire of these foxes to interact with humans.” She put her emotions on hold, though. She had to get down to business right away, preparing for the sampling procedure. Ideally, she should get blood samples for the molecular genetic analyses from three generations of foxes, and Lyudmila immediately assigned two people on the fox team the task of going through their gigantic genealogical database to identify which foxes to draw blood from. So efficient was the fox farm team that by the next morning, when Anna arrived at the Institute at 9:00 a.m., the list of foxes was all ready for her.
Lyudmila had also made arrangements to do the sampling at optimal speed. They had only a couple of days to do all of the work, and in the bitter winter cold, it couldn’t be done in the unheated sheds. The foxes would have to be brought inside. So Lyudmila organized an assembly line of ten of the caretakers, mostly women, to help take the foxes from their pens and bring them into one of the houses at the farm for drawing the blood. The pace of activity was intense, and when one worker slipped and broke his arm, he told the others to keep right on going and not concern themselves about him. It was a team effort par excellence. Anna was moved by the commitment of the workers. “It was an experience to meet these ladies,” she says, to see their “deep passion for the animals. They reminded me of some old zookeepers in Leningrad’s zoo from my childhood.”
How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) Page 18
