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In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell published the first of several best-selling books, The Tipping Point. In this book, we applied the Law of Plague to promote positive social change. Now, in Revenge of the Tipping Point (due out Oct. 1 from Little, Brown), he’s revisiting the lessons of that optimistic book and examining the flip side of those theories.
Topics in the new book range from cheetah breeding to the Harvard women’s rugby team to the Holocaust.
Read the excerpt below and don’t miss David Pogue and Malcolm Gladwell’s interview on “CBS Sunday Morning” on September 29th!
“Tipping Point Revenge” by Malcolm Gladwell
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In the 1970s, zookeepers around the world began to invest increasing resources in breeding their captive animal populations. The logic was clear. Why do we go to the trouble of capturing wild animals? A growing conservation movement also supported breeding programs. The new strategy was a huge success, but there was one big outlier: the cheater.
“Very few of their offspring survived, and many of them couldn’t even breed together,” recalls geneticist Stephen O’Brien, who worked at the National Cancer Institute at the time.
I didn’t understand what it meant. The cheetah seemed like a perfect example of evolutionary adaptability. A giant nuclear reactor for the heart, the feet of a greyhound, a skull shaped like a professional cyclist’s aerodynamic helmet, and semi-retractable claws that, in O’Brien’s words, “grasp”. When chasing prey at 60 miles per hour, the earth moves like a football cleat. ”
“It’s the fastest animal on the planet,” O’Brien said. “The second fastest animal on Earth is the American pronghorn. And the reason it’s second fastest is because it was running away from cheetahs.”
Zookeepers wondered if they were doing something wrong, or if there was something about the cheetah’s structure that they didn’t understand. They came up with theories and tried experiments, but all in vain. In the end, they just shrugged and said the animals must be “cranky.”
Things came to a head in 1980 at a meeting in Front Royal, Virginia. Zoo directors from around the world were in attendance, including the head of South Africa’s large-scale wildlife conservation program.
“And he said, ‘Does anyone know what they do scientifically?'” O’Brien remembers. “Basically, the cheetah breeding program in South Africa Do you want me to explain to you why we have only a percentage of success, but the rest of the animals, such as elephants, horses, and giraffes, reproduce like rats?”
Two scientists raised their hands. Both are colleagues of Mr. O’Brien. They flew to a large wildlife reserve near Pretoria, South Africa. They collected blood and sperm samples from dozens of cheetahs. What they discovered surprised them. The cheetah’s sperm count was low. And the sperm itself was horribly malformed. It is clear that this is why breeding animals has been so difficult. It’s not that they were “thoughtless.”
but why? O’Brien’s lab then began testing the blood samples sent to him. Researchers have previously conducted similar studies on birds, humans, horses and domestic cats, and in each case the animals showed a healthy degree of genetic diversity. In most species, about 30 percent of the genes sampled will show some degree of variation. . The cheetah’s genes were nothing like that. They were all the same. “I’ve never seen a species so genetically homogeneous,” O’Brien said.
O’Brien’s findings were met with skepticism by colleagues. So he and his team kept moving forward.
“I went to Children’s Hospital in Washington and learned how to do skin grafts in the burn unit,” he said. “They taught us everything, how to keep it sterile, how to take slices, how to suture, etc. And we did skin grafts on about eight cheetahs in South Africa, and We performed skin grafts on about six cheetahs, eight in Oregon. ”
Winston, Oregon, was home to Wildlife Safari, the largest collection of cheetahs in the United States at the time.
The idea was simple. When the skin of one animal is transplanted to another, the recipient’s body rejects it. Recognizes donor genes as foreign genes. “It will turn black and flake off within two weeks,” O’Brien said. But if you take a piece of skin from, say, an identical twin and transplant it to the other twin, it might work. The donor’s immune system considers the skin to be its own. This was the ultimate test of his hypothesis.
The graft was small, 1 inch by 1 inch, sewn into the side of the cat’s chest and protected by an elastic bandage wrapped around the cat’s body. First, the research team grafted domestic cat skin onto part of the cheetah to see if it had an immune system. Sure enough, the cheetah rejected the cat’s implant. The graft became inflamed and subsequently necrotic. Their bodies knew what was different. And my cat was different too. The team then grafted skin from other cheetahs. what happened? there is nothing! “They were accepted as if they were identical twins,” O’Brien said. “You only see that in inbred mice that have been bred for 20 generations. “I was convinced,” he said.
O’Brien realized that the world’s cheetah population must have been decimated at some point. His best guess was that it happened 12,000 years ago, during the Great Mammal Extinction, when saber-toothed cats, mastodons, mammoths, giant ground sloths, and more than 30 other species were wiped out by the Ice Age. Somehow the cheetah survived. But just barely.
“The number that fits all the data is less than 100, probably less than 50,” O’Brien said. In fact, the cheetah population may have been reduced to just one pregnant female. And the only way for a few solitary cheetahs to survive was to overcome the incestuous inhibitions that most mammals have. Sisters had to mate with brothers and cousins with cousins. Eventually the species revived, but only through endless duplication of the same narrow set of genes. Cheetah was still great. But now every cheetah expressed exactly the same kind of awesomeness.
From “Tipping Point Revenge: Overstory, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering” by Malcolm Gladwell. Copyright © 2024 by Malcolm Gladwell. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown & Company, a division of Hachette Book Group. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited.
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