How to pronounce “lyudmila” in English

Lyudmila knew that anyone who studied biology knew that, but it meant something that Belyaev stopped her and said, think about this.

Lyudmila calls Belyaev out there, and Belyaev looks at Dream, turns around, and asks Lyudmila, what kind of wonder is this?

Lyudmila is about up to here, and nevertheless, at 80 years old, she insisted upon taking me out to the house

Lyudmila bred those handful of elite females with a handful of elite males who would breed with them.

Lyudmila said, great.

And Lyudmila loves the idea.

So Lyudmila gets there, and Belyaev has money and power.

But Lyudmila said that Belyaev sent me, and Belyaev's name now carried enough weight that the director said, fine, test 500 foxes.

What Lyudmila did was she took half of the developing embryos-- one week old-- from the aggressive fox and moved them over to the uterus of the tame fox

So Lyudmila sets this up.

So Lyudmila says, "It was fascinating.

And Lyudmila has the perfect fox in mind.

But Lyudmila decided she was going to wait a year until Pushinka is ready to breed at one year old.

And Lyudmila looked down at Pushinka, and she could not believe what was happening.

And Lyudmila's first thought was, Pushinka is protecting me.

And when Lyudmila first talked to the director there and said what she wanted to do, he looked at her like she was nuts.

So here's what Lyudmila did-- she had five or six pairs of females.

That means that Lyudmila could color code the parents.

They ran to Lyudmila's office with cake and wine and had a giant party to celebrate it.

And so what Lyudmila would do every evening is, on the other side of this house, there's a little bench.

But what Lyudmila wanted to know with just how far down the path of domestication these animals had come, and Pushinka told her that.

And she approached Lyudmila because now the tools for studying genetics in dogs are easily adaptable to foxes.

And what Lyudmila envisions is they have plenty of foxes to keep the experiment going and also to put a few hundred into people's houses

So you're looking at Lyudmila holding Laska, which means "gentle." These animals were calm enough that Lyudmila could hold them

They wag their tails as Lyudmila approaches, and they whine and whimper when she leaves--

And one of the things that Lyudmila and her team have always been doing along the way is taking blood samples so that they can look for changes

Is it possible Pushinka wasn't protecting Lyudmila?

This is my friend and colleague and co-author Lyudmila Trut.

Six months later, Lyudmila, her husband, and their two-year-old daughter hop on a train from Moscow to Siberia, which is no easy train ride,

From day one, Lyudmila would tell you that her motto comes directly from the wonderful children's book, "The Little Prince," where the fox tells the little prince

Initially, Lyudmila describes these animals as fire-breathing dragons.

A year later, Lyudmila has to expand this classification system to what she calls the Class I-E, or the elite domesticated foxes.

So here is a description of those foxes in Lyudmila's own words-- "In the sixth generation, there appeared

The other thing that was really important to Lyudmila was that, when she was working down at Lesnoi, Belyaev was too busy to come visit very often, maybe

OK, so Lyudmila continues.

So at this point, Lyudmila goes to Belyaev with an audacious idea.

So for the first year or so, Lyudmila travels around the Soviet Union to all of the-- you know, to many of these fox farms I've told you about.

First of all, it meant that Lyudmila and a team now could work with the foxes everyday, not just four times a year, even if it is a couple of weeks

When he would come back, he would tell Lyudmila that his colleagues would come up to him after the talk and accuse him of trying to stick a picture of a dog puppy

And they often go way above the call of duty to work with Lyudmila.

Lyudmila continues, "She, the mother, was punishing her foster tame offspring for such--"

But then something else happened, which was that Lyudmila went over to the watchperson and began talking to them in a very calm, serene way.

By the '80s and '90s, Lyudmila was working with people who had very sophisticated equipment that allowed her to measure their faces and bodies

OK, so if you talk to Lyudmila 60 years after she began and continues to work on this experiment, and you ask her about our hopes and dreams for the future, what

The other thing that Lyudmila will tell you about her hopes is, one day, I'll be gone, but I want

So one of the people who comes into interview for the job is 25-year-old Lyudmila.

These animals can be held, but they don't show any emotional response towards Lyudmila.

Even though no one had ever tried this in an animal this big, Lyudmila learned a detailed surgical procedure so that she could swap developing embryos

The results are very similar across all females, but I'm going to let Lyudmila, in her own words, tell you what she found.