On July 25, 1978 Louise Brown became the first human to have been born after conception by in vitro fertilisation (IVF).IVF is a technique whereby an egg is fertilized by sperm outside the body (“in vitro” means “in a glass”).
While IVF techniques vary, the primary steps are:
Monitoring and stimulating a female’s ovulatory process.
Removing an ovum (egg) from the ovaries.
Letting sperm fertilize the eggs in a liquid in a laboratory.
Culturing the fertilized egg (or zygote) in a laboratory.
Implanting the fertilized egg back into the same female or into a different female.
if successful, pregnancy begins.
Now the process has been successfully applied to dogs. The process took considerable modification from human IVF techniques, and over 30 years of research was needed to produce a successful outcome with dogs. The technique was pioneered at Cornell University. The long-term aim is conserve endangered breeds.
In a successful trail, seven beagles and a cross-bred beagle-spaniel were born to a surrogate mother. The puppies were each from the same litter but they had three sets of parents.
The technique is described in the journal PLoS One, in a paper headed “Live Births from Domestic Dog (Canis familiaris) Embryos Produced by In Vitro Fertilization.”
