She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer Read Free Book Online Page B

approached his vision. Bakewell believed that the traits he could see on the outside of a sheep were linked to qualities on the inside, ones that could be passed down to offspring.
    “He asserts,” a visitor to Dishley Grange wrote, “the smaller the bones, thetruer will be the make of the beast—the quicker she will fat—and her weight, we may easily conceive, will have a larger proportion of valuable meat.”
    Bakewell traveled England inspecting rams and brought home a select few to breed with his ewes. When he crossed these sheep, they did not instantly produce a uniform supply of New Leicester lambs. Instead, their litters were a hodgepodge, made up of lambs of different sizes and shapes. But Bakewell did not lose faith in his vision. He turned his exacting eye to his lambs. He picked out ones to mate with one another, or with other sheep he bought from other farms. These cycles of inspection and selection went on for years, during which time Bakewell turned his farm into a primitive laboratory. He herded his sheep into houses and sheds kept as clean as horse stables so that he could experiment on their heredity in secret. He measured his sheep and weighed them every week until slaughter.He chalked his data on slates and then transferred them to ledgers, which sadly were later lost.
    In time, the sheep began to accord with the animal that gamboled in Bakewell’s mind. He stopped touring England to buy rams. Instead, he employed a strategy known as in-and-in breeding. Bakewell mated cousin to cousin, brother to sister, father to daughter. Other farmers thought him mad because they believed inbreeding invariably led to disaster. That might be true for other farmers, but not for Bakewell. He was able to make sure that all the qualities he wanted in his sheep became fixed in his flock, but none of the deformities that might ruin his new breed.
    After fifteen years, Old Leicester had at last become New Leicester. People foundBakewell’s new breed—with its broad, barrel-shaped body; its straight, short, flat back; its small head; and its short, small-boned legs—peculiarly pleasing to the eye. New Leicester mutton might not have the fine flavor that aristocrats clamored for. One critic even declared it “only fit to glide down the throat of a Newcastle coal-heaver.” But Bakewell didn’t care about epicurean snobs. “My people want fat mutton and I gave it to them,” he declared.
    He was fibbing a bit. With a flock of just a few hundred New Leicester, Bakewell couldn’t feed the millions of hungry English. Instead, he sold hissheep to other breeders, who started their own New Leicester flocks. They paid him dearly. They were even willing to do something that had previously been unheard-of: They would rent his rams for their services. Bakewell sent the rams to their appointments in two-wheel sprung carriages, suspended inside from slings. He claimed the right to take the best lambs produced by his rented rams, improving his own flock even more.
    Dishley Grange itself became a destination for travelers, who came from as far as Russia to see Bakewell’s work and learn about the astonishing methods of “this prince of breeders.” Bakewell welcomed visits. He turned his house into a museum of heredity, filling it with sheep skeletons and brine-pickled joints, demonstrating the transformation he had brought about in his animals. It was great public relations. Bakewell’s visitors wrote letters and books about his experiments. One French nobleman declared that Bakewell “had been making observations, and studying how to bring into being his fine breed of animals with as much care as one would put into the study of mathematics or any of the sciences.”
    In fact, Bakewell didn’t leave behind a single measurement of a sheep. He published no law of heredity to explain his success. Bakewell lived at the turning point in the history of heredity, when people recognized it as something to be understood and manipulated,