Keynote Address at the 1985 Annual Meeting
1986; Oxford University Press; Volume: 62; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2527/jas1986.6261742x
ISSN1544-7847
Autores ResumoGrasp our jubilee diamond between the forefinger and opposing thumb. Watch as bursts of rainbow colors shower when a facet is struck by sunlight. As scientists, this prism effect is predictable. As artists, the color array is beautiful when by chance it cascades over a nearby object. Both responses are natural; our humanity demands it! By sharing our rich, multifaceted heritage with students, we become prisms that analyze the colorful episodes and recombine them into an integral picture that surrounds humans and the animals chosen to be domestics. Our heritage joins the art and science of husbandry to the totality of human experience. A university education should prepare one to live life abundantly, not simply be a retrainable technician of the time. Brilliant insights into creating the future come from those prepared to learn from the distilled wisdom of the ages. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ramifications of our contributions first as husbandmen and then as scientists to the livestock world. We as scientists came lately, relative to our extensive heritage, but the impact has been "highly significant," to use our common jargon of statistics! The paper attempts to relive our transition as a single imaginative experience through much time and space. The task appeared so small, before the rewarding research began. The paper deals with the interactions among the factors that influenced the building of our profession. The chronology is disjointed, and it was. Human ages can be unequally divided into hunter, agriculturist, industrialist and informationist. Our interest centers on the latter two ages.
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