If a Bull Were a Cow, How Much Milk Would He Give?

Abstract

I became enamored of genetics at an early age. The desire to participate in the rebuilding of my people in our ancient homeland led to dairy science at Rutgers University, to Animal Breeding Plans by J.L. Lush, and to the realization that I could combine genetics and dairy science in animal breeding. It is to my mother-in-law that I owe the felicitous phrasing of the titular scientific question that has occupied my professional life: If a bull were a cow, how much milk would he give? Following my PhD (in 1956), I joined the Volcani Institute in Israel and, later (in 1972), the Applied Genetics group at the Hebrew University. The Applied Genetics group had an active marker lab, and this and a paper by Spickett & Thoday led me to explore genetic markers for quantitative trait loci mapping and marker-assisted selection. A chance encounter with Jacques Beckmann in 1980 opened my eyes to the potential of DNA-level markers for these purposes, and the rest followed.