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SCIENCEFriday 11 December 2015
7 half-pound mutts become first test-tube puppies in world Are you grumpy?
At least it won’t
SUE MANNING This photo shows seven week-old puppies born by in vitro fertilization at the Baker Institute for Ani- shorten your life
Associated Press mal Health in Ithaca, N.Y. The advancement opens the door for conserving endangered species
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A of canids and for eradicating heritable diseases in dogs. MARIA CHENG
team of veterinarians, sci- AP Medical Writer
entists and lab workers (Michael Carroll/Cornell via AP) LONDON (AP) — There’s
gathered around a surro- good news for grumpy
gate hound and watched In vitro fertilization, the pro- Dog pregnancies last only birth of the seven puppies women: Being happy ap-
her give birth to seven half- cess of fertilizing an egg two months and females “as a huge breakthrough.” parently has no effect on
pound puppies, the first with sperm outside the go into heat just once or A paper describing the how long you might live.
dogs ever conceived in a body, is widely used to as- twice a year, releasing im- Cornell litter as “the first That’s the conclusion of the
test tube. sist human reproduction mature eggs instead of live births from in vitro fertil- latest attempt to find out if
“We each took a puppy these days. The first human mature eggs needed for ized embryos in the dog” happy people live longer.
and rubbed it with a little birth from IVF took place in IVF. appeared Tuesday in the Previous studies have
towel and when it started 1978. An earlier experiment at PLOS ONE journal. The lead linked happiness to lon-
to squiggle and cry, we But IVF efforts with dogs re- Cornell helped pave the author, Smithsonian Con- gevity but researchers now
knew we had success,” peatedly failed until now, way. In 2013 at Cornell, servation Biology Institute say there’s no such scien-
said Dr. Alexander Travis, according to Dr. Pierre Klondike became the first doctoral fellow Jennifer tific connection. So while
who runs the lab at the Comizzoli, a reproductive puppy born from a frozen Nagashima, said IVF tech- being sick makes you un-
Baker Institute for Animal physiologist for the Smith- embryo. Klondike’s beagle nology in dogs could prove happy, just being grouchy
Health at Cornell Univer- sonian Conservation Biol- mother was fertilized using useful in everything from isn’t enough to make you ill
sity’s College of Veterinary ogy Institute in Front Royal, artificial insemination. Her conserving endangered or shorten your life.
Medicine in Ithaca, New Virginia, which works with embryos were collected, species to removing “del- The results are based on
York. Cornell. frozen and implanted in eterious traits from breeds,” questionnaires from more
“Their eyes were closed. “The biology of the dog is Klondike’s surrogate moth- with research potentially than 715,000 British women
They were just adorable, really, really different than er. applicable to “models for aged 50 to 69 who were
cute, with smooshed-in humans,” Comizzoli said. Comizzoli described the human disease” as well.q enrolled in a national
faces. We checked them breast cancer screening
to make sure they looked program in the late 1990s.
normal and were all The women were asked
breathing,” he said. things like how often
The puppies born July 10 they felt happy and how
are a mix of beagle, Lab- healthy they were. Nearly
rador and cocker span- 40 percent of the women
iel and are now healthy said they were happy most
5-month-olds, Travis said. of the time while 17 per-
All but one female were cent said they were un-
adopted. She’s being kept happy.
by the lab to have her own After a decade of tracking
litter. the women, 4 percent had
The lab kept track of the died.
puppies by painting their Scientists found the death
nails with different color rate among unhappy
polish. Travis adopted two, women was the same as
still known by their nail pol- those who were happy.
ish names, Red and Green. The research was pub-
lished online Wednesday
SpaceX: in the medical journal Lan-
cet.
Launches may resume Dec. 19, 6 months after accident “It’s such a common be-
lief that stress and unhap-
MARCIA DUNN Thursday a rocket test-firing off. The accident left NASA SpaceX hopes to resume piness causes death and
AP Aerospace Writer for next Wednesday in Flori- without a viable U.S. sup- supply runs next month. disease but it’s actually the
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida da. A satellite launch for Or- plier for the International In the meantime, SpaceX other way around,” said
(AP) — SpaceX says it’s bcomm could come three Space Station. NASA’s will try again to land its Richard Peto, a professor
close to launching rockets days later — Dec. 19th. other commercial shipper, first-stage booster, possibly at the University of Oxford
again six months after an SpaceX has been stuck Orbital ATK, finally made a back at Cape Canaveral who was one of the study’s
accident. on Earth since June, when delivery Wednesday, but Air Force Station. Barge authors.
Chief executive Elon Musk a broken strut doomed its had to use another com- landing attempts have “People should focus on
announced via Twitter on Falcon rocket during lift- pany’s rocket. failed.q the real issues that shorten
their lives, like smoking and
obesity.”q
