And this… (George chuckles) This relates back to one of the first things that I’d gotten a geneticist out at Argonne to look at, got shortly after I arrived at Brookfield back in the 50s, this man who had been studying twining in humans wondered if there were any records in terms of animals in the collection. And I indicated that we did not have any such at Brookfield because of Robert Bean’s inclinations or disinclinations to keep records, but that there were studies on a couple of the creatures that had been kept in captivity where we knew the basis for the population and in particular, the European bison or wisent. And so I turned over to him the studbook, a published studbook that happened to be sitting up in the library room in the administration building and one of the acquisitions that Bean had simply acquired, I mean, not studied or reflected on. So a publication resulted in the journal Genetics about the inbreeding effects and in the case of the wisent. And it was pretty amazing at first generation, there was sort of hybrid vigor because of the circumstances with the very small population, the 13 animals that established the species in captivity. And so the first generation hybrid vigor, so to speak, in terms of the stature and the health of the animals, et cetera, and then second and third generations, there were evidences of inbreeding depression of various kinds. And so I challenged Bruce Brewer in his return to Cornell to take up such studies.
