The Daring Russian Geneticist Whose Experiments on Silver Foxes Explained Domestication Has Died

The Daring Russian Geneticist Whose Experiments on Silver Foxes Explained Domestication Has Died

By Lee Alan Dugatkin & Aaron Dugatkin

Lyudmila Trut, the geneticist who led the decades-long experiment that created hundreds of ultralovable domesticated foxes on a farm in Novosibirsk, Russia, died peacefully in her sleep on October 9, just shy of her 91st birthday. Over the past six decades, the work that Trut and her colleagues have done on the silver fox, a variant of the red fox, has become the gold standard for understanding the process of domestication.

When 25-year-old Trut graduated Moscow State University in 1958, she took a huge risk. Geneticist Dmitri Belyaev had asked her to head an experiment using foxes, which are closely related to dogs, to better understand how the process of domestication unfolded and what evolutionary forces were in play. The risk lay not only in the fact that an experiment on domestication in a large mammal could take decades to run but because the megalomaniacal Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko, whose denouncement of Mendelian—what he called “Western”—genetics exacerbated famines that killed millions, still wielded enough power in the Soviet Union to have people jailed for doing the genetic research that rested at the heart of the silver fox domestication experiment. Trut saw the scientific potential and accepted the risks. For the next 66 years, she devoted her life to that experiment, adopting a motto from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince: “You become responsible forever for what you have tamed.”

The radical idea that Belyaev (who died in 1985) and Trut set out to test was that domestication syndrome—the phenomenon in which domesticated species share a suite of characteristics, including floppy ears, a curly tail, juvenilized facial and body…