7 half-pound mutts become first test-tube puppies in world

LOS ANGELES – 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.

“We each took a puppy and rubbed it with a little towel and when it started to squiggle and cry, we knew we had success,” said Dr. Alexander Travis, who runs the lab at the Baker Institute for Animal Health at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, New York.

The puppies born July 10 are a mix of beagle, Labrador and cocker spaniel and are now healthy 5-month-olds, Travis said. All but one female were adopted. She’s being kept by the lab to have her own litter.

In vitro fertilization, the process of fertilizing an egg with sperm outside the body, is widely used to assist human reproduction these days. The first human birth from IVF took place in 1978.

But IVF efforts with dogs repeatedly failed until now, according to Dr. Pierre Comizzoli, a reproductive physiologist for the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia, which works with Cornell.

Comizzoli described the birth of the seven puppies “as a huge breakthrough.”

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.”