Professor Jay Laurence Lush, the father of modern animal breeding, was a celebrated researcher, educator, and mentor who spent most of his career on the faculty of Iowa State University. It's difficult to find a pedigree of an animal breeder that doesn't include Dr. Lush, much as most pedigrees of mathematicians include Paul Erdős‘s. Those of us working in the field of quantitiative genetics of livestock owe Dr. Lush a tremendous debt of gratitude for his deep insight into genetics, dedication to education, and passion for establishing formal frameworks to guide our practice. The work he did with Lanois Hazel on selection indices is still used today to inform breeding programs.

He revolutionized livestock genetics by rigorously applying statistical and mathematical principles to the art of animal breeding, moving the field from one based in anecdotes and rules-of-thumb to one based firmly on scientific principles. His book "Animal Breeding Plans", first published in 1937, is still notable for is straightforward presentation and deep intuition. His 1948 course notes on "The Genetics of Populations" were used for decades before they were published by Iowa State University in 1994. That may not seem important today when there's a rich literature describing population genetics from many different perspectives, but it was revolutionary in the 1940s.

The Department of Animal Science at Iowa State University has posted a biography of Dr. Jay L. Lush on their website. A Wikipedia entry also includes links to some primary information about Dr. Lush's life. A symposium in honor of Dr. Lush was held jointly by the American Dairy Science Association, American Society of Animal Science, and the Poultry Science Association on July 29, 1972, and the proceedings provide both biographical information and a detailed explanation of why and how his work was so important. It does not appear that any of the societies has digitised these papers, but that's a project for another day, and one likely to be delayed due to copyright issues.

As part of my interest in typography and book design, and as a first step towards an annotated edition of this fundamental work, I've recently typeset "Animal Breeding Plans, Second Edition, Sixth Printing" (1958) from scratch. You can find PDF scans of the chapters, OCR text, and LaTeX source in the Animal-Breeding-Plans repository on  GitHub.