Iowa State University

Jay Laurence Lush , Shambaugh, Iowa - May 22, 1982 was a pioneering animal geneticist who made important contributions to livestock breeding. He is... sometimes known as the father of modern scientific animal breeding. Lush received National Medal of Science in 1968 and the Wolf Prize in 1979. Lush was introduced to mathematics and genetics during his B.Sc. studies of animal husbandry at the Kansas State Agricultural College . He completed his M.Sc. in 1918 at KSU, and his Ph.D. in genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison . Lush advocated breeding not based on subjective appearance of the animal, but on quantitative statistics and genetic information. Lush authored a classic book 'Animal Breeding Plans' in 1937 which greatly influenced animal breeding around the world. From 1930 to 1966, Lush was the Charles F. Curtiss Distinguished Professor in Agriculture at Iowa State University. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1967.
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Jane Smiley is an American novelist. Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and... graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained an A.B. at Vassar College, then earned an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar. Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script, produced for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists. Her essay "Feminism Meets the Free Market" was included in the 2006 anthology Mommy Wars by Washington Post writer Leslie Morgan Steiner.
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