A team of veterinarians, scientists and lab workers gathered around a surrogate hound and watched her give birth to seven half-pound puppies, the first dogs ever conceived in a test tube.
A paper describing the Cornell litter as “the first live births from in vitro fertilized embryos in the dog” appeared Tuesday in the PLOS ONE journal. The lead author, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute doctoral fellow Jennifer Nagashima, said IVF technology in dogs could prove useful in everything from conserving endangered species to removing “deleterious traits from breeds,” with research potentially applicable to “models for human disease” as well.
