Improving the Breed

Dr. Cyril Adams and his colleagues at Cambridge University's Animal Research Center have long been harvesting ova from hormone-treated highbred ewes, fertilizing them with sperm from highbred rams and planting them in the wombs of lowbred ewes. This is a handy way to multiply valuable animal strains far faster than nature can do the same job, but when Dr. Adams wanted to improve the breed of South African sheep by shipping the fertilized ova to Natal, he ran into difficulty. They cannot be shipped frozen, and there was no mechanical device that would keep them alive in a natural state.

The answer to the problem was hopping around a nearby pen. Dr. Adams inserted the fertilized ova in the womb of a female rabbit and shipped her by air to South Africa. There, four days later, Dr. George Hunter in Pietermaritzburg flushed the ova out with sheep's blood serum and found them still healthy. Transferred to ewes of low degree, six of them are about to be delivered as highbred English lambs.

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