Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Let us delve into the experimental practices at Halle to understand all this fuzz around the University’s Karakul flock. Hornitschek began to work on Karakul at the Halle Institute of Animal Breeding in 1937, dealing mostly with the developmental genetics of curly hair.[35] He joined a long-term project at the institute, led by Frölich, that had been using histological, morphological, and physiological methods to study the development of hair on Karakul since the early 1920s.[36] Halle researchers had already differentiated between two types of hair formed at different stages of fetal development.[37] Primary hair follicles—groups of cells set aside by the epidermis—were formed at around 70 days, 3 weeks before the secondary hair follicles. That finding was relevant because the proportion between the two types of follicles and their respective development pace determined the overall form of the skin. Secondary hair begins to grow at an increased rate only after birth, forming the mixed wool fleece characteristic of adult Karakul sheep and used for carpet. Only during the first few days of a Karakul lamb’s life does primary hair dominate the skin configuration forming the much-prized curly patterns exhibited in the luxurious Persian fur coats. This proved that selecting Karakul rams for the production of fur coats on the basis of the characteristics of adult sheep fleece, as was advocated by non-academic breeders, was simply nonsense.[38] Making decisions about breeding required knowledge of developmental processes. The changing proportion of primary and secondary hair also explains why the production of Persian fur coats requires that the lamb be slaughtered in its first 48 hours of life, after which the curls begin to disappear. The profitable business of Karakul farming was not for the fainthearted.

Under Frölich’s supervision, Hornitschek built on the aforementioned research, studying in detail how hair development produced the many different curly patterns observable in Karakul. The different patterns determined the value of a fur, pelts with tubular curls being the most valuable. Hornitschek made use of the institute’s collection of about 200 pelts from different geographic regions, skins from freshly slaughtered lambs, and fetuses preserved in formol. Karakul were particularly suitable for such studies because the natural pigmentation of their follicles didn’t require laborious staining for microscopic observation.[39]

As Hornitschek explicitly mentioned, he was using the practices associated with the Phënogenetik (phenogenetics) studies of Valentin Haecker, chairman of the department of zoology at Halle.[40] Phenogenetics aimed to bridge the gap between hereditary factors and traits by following development backward, starting from mature phenotypes and tracing their causes to the germ cells, instead of starting with the fertilized egg as was done in experimental embryology. One took the normal and variant forms of a well-defined trait and then followed its developmental stages back until one could identify a branch point before which the patterns of development were identical. Phenogenetics was part of what Jonathan Harwood famously called the German style of genetics, with its special focus on development processes, contrasting it with the American transmission genetics of Thomas Hunt Morgan’s school.[41] Frölich himself leaves no doubt that since the early 1920s he had based his program of research with Karakul on Haecker’s views of developmental genetics.[42]

^{Figure 6.5 Karakul curl patterns.}

^{(Frölich and Hornitschek, Das Karakulschaf und seine Zucht, pp. 102–103)}