Dmitry Konstantinovich Belyayev (Russian: Дми́трий Константи́нович Беля́ев; 17 July 1917 – 14 November 1985) was a Soviet geneticist and academician who served as director of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics (IC&G) of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, from 1959 to 1985.

His decades-long effort to breed domesticated silver foxes was described by The New York Times as “arguably the most extraordinary breeding experiment ever conducted.”[1] A 2010 article in Scientific American stated that Belyayev “may be the man most responsible for our understanding of the process by which wolves were domesticated into our canine companions.”[2] Beginning in the 1950s, in order to uncover the genetic basis of the distinctive behavioral and physiological attributes of domesticated animals, Belyayev and his team spent decades breeding the silver fox (Vulpes vulpes) and selecting for reproduction only those individuals in each generation that showed the least fear of humans.

Belyayev has since been vindicated in recent years by major scientific journals, and by the Soviet establishment as a pioneering figure in modern genetics.

His brother Nikolai, who was 18 years his senior, was a prominent geneticist who worked with Sergei Chetverikov (1880–1959), a pioneer of population genetics.

At the time Belyayev came of age, however, life was dangerous in the Soviet Union for geneticists with such views, because the Stalinist regime supported the scientific theories of agronomist Trofim Lysenko and outlawed research inspired by the findings of Gregor Mendel.

[6] The next year, Belyayev graduated from the Ivanov Biological Institute and began working in the Department of Fur Animal Breeding at the Central Research Laboratory in Moscow, which was affiliated with the Ministry of Foreign Trade.

[7][9] In 2019, an international research team questioned some of the conclusions that they suggested had been abusively drawn from this famous experiment (sometimes by the popular culture rather than the Russian scientists themselves), especially regarding the domestication syndrome while it remains "a resource for investigation of the genomics and biology of behavior", given the origin of the fox population used in a Canadian fur farm where some traits might have been pre-selected.

[7][15] In 2017, the sculpture "Dmitriy Belyaev and Domesticated Fox" was built near Institute of Cytology and Genetics (Novosibirsk) in the honor of the 100th anniversary of his birth.