Siegel traces career back to 4-H roots

Since 1957, Paul Siegel, a University Distinguished Professor and profes-sor emeritus in the School of Animal Sciencesat Virginia Tech, has studied poultry genetics by developing pedigree lines of chickens. (Photo courtesy John McCormick, Virginia Tech)

Blacksburg, Va. — Paul Siegel has been breeding chickens since he was 3 years old.
On his family’s 35-acre farm east of Hartford, Conn., where the Siegels raised chickens and grew tobacco, sweet corn, and cabbage, he would look at the chickens’ red and the white feathers, see the offspring’s colors, and ask himself, “Why?” 
“If I put a white rooster with a red hen, sometimes they all come out white,” Siegel recalled thinking. “Sometimes they come out as a hodgepodge. I was learning sex linkage. You’re developing this inquiring mind at a very early age.”
Since 1957, Siegel, a University Distinguished Professor and professor emeritus in the School of Animal Sciences at Virginia Tech, has studied poultry genetics by developing pedigree lines of chickens.
Siegel uses them to learn how applying genetics to the breeding of high-quality chickens, aiming for traits such as high body weight, may affect the animal’s complex biology — a balance of skeletal, muscular, cardiovascular, and other yet undiscovered resources.
Siegel has worked with scientists from around the world using these lines and has published hundreds of studies on the subject and others in poultry genetics, like the evolution of chickens and the role of genetic adaptations in domestication.
Three-year-old Siegel may have sensed that much more was at work beneath the soft down of the chicks for which he cared.
He had always been drawn to them over the tobacco or the vegetables, which didn’t peck or run off at his touch.
For the rest of his childhood, Siegel knew he wanted to work with chickens for a living somehow.
But he didn’t know there was a way, until he joined 4-H in middle school and through it, met a researcher named Walter Collins.
It’s this brief encounter and the years Siegel spent in his local 4-H Poultry Club that set him on a path to a 70-year career in poultry genetics.
“I just wanted to work with the chickens,” Siegel said. “4-H provided the vehicle.”
Paul Siegel, university distinguished professor emeritus, with his high and low growth chickens in 2010. Photo by John McCormick for Virginia Tech.
When Siegel was 10, he went to 4-H State Congress at the University of Connecticut.
He met Collins, a researcher at the university, at a short course. Siegel asked Collins what he did.
Collins described himself as a poultry geneticist, which made Siegel perk up. Collins described the work: doing experiments with chickens.
What did it take to get that kind of job? A Ph.D., Collins said. From then on, Siegel had a goal.
In middle school, Poultry Club offered Siegel extracurricular activities in line with future study of poultry genetics.
But beyond that, Siegel said, his 4-H experiences taught him how to learn for the love of it and fail without falling apart — lessons he received mainly while competing in poultry judging and the Junior State Chicken of Tomorrow contest.
After World War II, the USDA alongside the country’s major poultry organizations, launched the Chicken of Tomorrow program and its state, regional, and national contests to stoke innovation in the newly-formed broiler industry, as Maryn McKenna described in National Geographic. The contests, open to big companies and small farmers alike, challenged competitors to breed a better chicken.
4-H ran Junior State Chicken of Tomorrow contests encouraging students to do the same, and at 16, Siegel entered his flock into the contest for the first time at the encouragement of one of his local 4-H leaders. He came in second.
The next year, he won.“The Chicken-of-Tomorrow Committee presents this Certificate of Quality to Paul Siegel for outstanding achievement in breeding and development of superior meat-type chickens,” reads the plaque he received, which still hangs on the wall of Siegel’s study.
In 4-H, Siegel lost more often than he won.
“I kept losing,” he said. “You lose a heck of a lot more than you win. I was also in Garden Club, and I would enter squash and other things. Most of the time, somebody else won. But you had the fun of participating. And so, you learned how to be a graceful loser. And if you learned to be a graceful loser, you also learned not to be an arrogant winner. That’s what things like 4-H teach you.”
Looking back, Siegel credits his 4-H leaders for pointing him toward the activities that ended up defining much of his youth.