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In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell published the first of several best-selling books, “The Tipping Point,” in which he applied the laws of epidemics to promote positive social change. Now he returns to the lessons of this optimistic book in “Revenge of the Tipping Point” (to be published October 1 by Little, Brown & Co.), to examine the other side of the coin of these theories.
Topics in the new book range from breeding cheetahs and the Harvard women’s rugby team to the Holocaust.
Read the excerpt below and Don’t miss David Pogue’s interview with Malcolm Gladwell on “CBS Sunday Morning” on September 29!
“Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
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In the 1970s, zookeepers around the world began investing more and more resources into breeding their captive animal populations. The logic was clear. Why bother capturing animals in the wild? The growing conservation movement has also favored breeding programs. The new strategy was a great success, with one big exception: the cheetah.
“They rarely had offspring that survived, and many of them, once they got together, couldn’t reproduce,” recalls geneticist Stephen O’Brien, who was then working at the National Cancer Institute.
It didn’t make any sense. The cheetah seemed a perfect example of evolutionary fitness: a huge nuclear reactor for a heart, the paws of a greyhound, a skull shaped like a professional cyclist’s aerodynamic helmet, and semi-retractable claws which, as O’ said, Brien, “grip the earth like football cleats as they run after their prey at sixty miles an hour.
“It’s the fastest animal on earth,” O’Brien said. “The second fastest animal on earth is the pronghorn antelope. And the reason it’s the second fastest is because it was running away from cheetahs.”
The zookeepers wondered if they were doing something wrong or if there was something about the cheetah’s makeup that they didn’t understand. They proposed theories and tried experiments – to no avail. Finally, they shrugged their shoulders and said the animals must be “finicky.”
Things came to a head at a 1980 meeting in Front Royal, Virginia. Zoo directors from around the world were present, including the head of a large wildlife conservation program in South Africa.
“And he says, ‘Is there anyone who knows what he’s doing scientifically?’ ” O’Brien remembers. “‘[To] Basically, explain to us why our cheetah breeding program in South Africa is about 15 percent successful while the rest of these animals – elephants, horses and giraffes – breed like rats? “
Two scientists raised their hands, both colleagues of O’Brien. They flew to South Africa, to a large wildlife reserve near Pretoria. They took blood and sperm samples from dozens of cheetahs. What they found amazed them. The cheetahs’ sperm counts were low. And the sperm themselves were severely malformed. This was clearly why animals had such difficulty reproducing. It wasn’t that they were “capricious.”
But why? O’Brien’s lab then began testing the blood samples sent to them. They had carried out similar studies in the past on birds, humans, horses and domestic cats, and in all of these cases the animals showed a good degree of genetic diversity: in most species, about 30% of the genes sampled will show some degree of variation. . The cheetah’s genes were nothing like this. They were all the same. “I’ve never seen a species so genetically uniform,” O’Brien said.
O’Brien’s findings were met with skepticism by his colleagues. So he and his team continued.
“I went to Washington Children’s Hospital and learned how to do skin grafts in a burn unit,” he said. “They taught me how to keep it sterile and how to take the… slices and how to suture it and everything. And then we did it. [skin grafts on] about eight cheetahs in South Africa, and then we captured another six or eight in Oregon. »
Winston, Oregon was at the time home to the Wildlife Safari, the largest collection of cheetahs in the United States.
The idea was simple. If you graft a piece of skin from one animal onto another, the recipient’s body will reject it. It will recognize the donor’s genes as foreign. “It would blacken and disappear in two weeks,” O’Brien said. But if you take a piece of skin, for example, from one identical twin and graft it onto another, it will work. The donor’s immune system thinks the skin belongs to it. This was the ultimate test of his hypothesis.
The grafts were small – an inch by an inch, sewn to the side of the animal’s chest, protected by an elastic bandage wrapped around the cat’s body. First, the team gave some cheetahs a skin graft from a domestic cat, simply to ensure the animals had an immune system. Sure enough, the cheetahs rejected the cat’s transplant: it became inflamed, then necrotic. Their bodies knew what was different – and a house cat was different. Next, the team grafted skin from other cheetahs. What happened? Nothing! They were accepted, O’Brien said, “as if they were identical twins. The only place you see is in inbred mice mated between siblings for twenty generations. And that convinced me.”
O’Brien realized that the world’s cheetah population must have been devastated at some point. His best guess was that this happened during the disappearance of large mammals 12,000 years ago – when saber-toothed cats, mastodons, mammoths, giant ground sloths and more than thirty other species were wiped out by an ice age. Somehow the cheetah survived. But barely.
“The numbers that fit all the data are less than a hundred, maybe less than fifty,” O’Brien said. It is possible, in fact, that the cheetah population has been reduced to just one pregnant female. And the only way for these few solitary cheetahs to survive was to overcome the inhibition that most mammals have against incest: sisters had to mate with brothers, first cousins with first cousins. . The species eventually rebounded, but only through endless replication of the same restricted set of genes. The cheetah looked as magnificent as ever. But now, every cheetah represented exactly the same kind of magnificence.
Excerpted from “Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering” by Malcolm Gladwell. Copyright © 2024 by Malcolm Gladwell. Reprinted with permission from Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.
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