Mother Was a Thoroughbred

In a white frame laboratory on an outpost of the Essar Ranch near San Antonio, an intense young scientist is operating on a partially anesthetized cow. He injects a local anesthetic into a shaved area on the flank, swabs it with alcohol and makes an incision. Ten minutes later he sews up the incision. The cow is only a scrub from the range of a nearby rancher--but if all goes well she will bear a calf which has two pedigreed parents.

Last week Ray E. Umbaugh, 28, who has never had time to take a degree, told a group of cattlemen and animal husbandry experts the details of an artificial impregnation experiment which may revolutionize the beef and dairy industries. With 500 cows lined up under contract with neighboring ranchers, Umbaugh is ready for mass experimentation.

Quality. No matter how purebred the bull used for insemination (natural or artificial), it has always taken a purebred cow to produce a purebred calf. Scrub cows would produce half-breeds of unpredictable value. At Purdue University in 1941, Ray Umbaugh got the idea of carrying artificial insemination a step further. He asked himself: Why not transplant ova from pedigreed cows to scrubs?

Other researchers had already transplanted the fecund rabbit's ova. But cows usually produce only one ovum at a time. Umbaugh perfected a process of "super-ovulation"--injecting the cows with a pituitary extract which causes them to produce an average of 23 ova.

These ova are artificially inseminated in the pedigreed cow. Then they are removed from the ovaries, through an incision in the flank, and transplanted, through the flank, to scrub foster mothers.

Quantity. In experiments last year Umbaugh induced three foster pregnancies, but all aborted. He believes now that the fault was multiple pregnancy: he had injected 15 ova at once, and cows have difficulty in carrying even twins. In future, he intends to insert only one fertilized ovum into each foster cow.

The Umbaugh experiment is being financed by Tom Slick, millionaire oilman, cattleman and inventor (TIME, Jan. 28, 1946), through his Foundation for Applied Science at the Essar (short for Scientific Research) Ranch. When the project was formally unveiled there last week, Foundation Director Dr. Harold Vagtborg optimistically gloated that it might be possible "to convert all cattle herds into registered stock of the finest quality in a single generation."

Umbaugh's next project: transplanting the ova of mares. If that works, he may yet have a brewery horse foaling a Derby winner.

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