Lee Dugatkin - Power Point presentation and book signing

Lee Dugatkin, Ph.D.

How to Tame a Fox and Build a Dog or How Russian Scientists have Created a New Pet

“Part science, part Russian fairy tale and part spy thriller.... {A} sparkling new book...It may serve - particularly now - as a parable of the lessons that emerge from unfettered science, if we have the courage to let it unfold." - New York Times Book Review

For the last six decades, a dedicated team of researchers in Siberia has been domesticating silver foxes to replay the evolution of the dog in real time. Russian scientist Lyudmila Trut has led this work since 1959, and together with biologist and historian of science, Lee Dugatkin, she tells the inside story of the science, politics, adventure and love behind it all. Like a set of Russian nesting dolls, How to Tame a Fox and Build a Dog opens up to reveal story after story, each embedded within the one that preceded it.  Inside this tale of path-breaking science in the midst of the often brutal -35° winters of Siberia is hidden a remarkable collaboration between an older, freethinking scientific genius and a trusting, but gutsy young woman. Together these two risked not just their careers, but to an extent their lives, to make scientific history. If you go one level deeper, you find yourself lost in the magical tale of how some hardscrabble but openhearted humans and the wild animals who they domesticated developed such deep attachments to each other that both seemed to forget the species divide between them.

Wine and cheese reception follows

This literary event is organized in collaboration with St-Petersburg Global Trade House.

RACC’s programs and events are made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, Cojeco and Tianaderrah Foundation.