Foal is veterinary Mira(cle)

— -- Kristin Contro spends her evenings watching a buckskin-colored foal prance across the pastures outside her home in Endwell, N.Y. The foal's name? Mira, for miracle. And to Contro, the young horse is nothing short of that.

A rare and technically challenging bit of reproductive surgery, only once before successful, allowed for Mira to be born Aug. 4 in Binghamton, from eggs harvested from Contro's beloved mare Reba, who died on Sept. 9, 2008.

Contro, 28, and Reba won dozens of prizes barrel racing over their six years together. The mare had to be put down because of a perforated intestine after a broken jaw led to a bad case of colic, a common ailment in horses.

Afterward, Contro was "hysterical, because one of my favorite horses in the whole world was dead," she says.

But something made Contro, a physician's assistant at Regional Rheumatology Associates in Binghamton, ask the veterinarians at Cornell University who had been caring for Reba, "Can you save her eggs?"

An emergency call went out to Sylvia Bedford-Guaus, a professor of animal reproduction at Cornell's School of Veterinary Medicine. By the time she got there, too many hours had gone by to allow Reba's ovaries to be removed and sent intact to have their eggs harvested, a somewhat common operation in veterinary circles.

So Bedford-Guaus offered to do something much more difficult: dissect the ovaries, find the microscopic immature eggs and preserve them in a nutrient "broth" that would buy them enough time to ship them to a laboratory where they could be matured and fertilized.

After the painstaking work, Bedford-Guaus ended up with nine immature eggs, or oocytes. These were shipped to the laboratory of Katrin Hinrichs, at Texas A&M's school of veterinary physiology. Hinrichs, a specialist in equine reproduction, helped clone the first horse in North America in 2005.

After 24 hours maturing in a special growth medium, just five eggs survived to be fertilized. Only two viable embryos resulted. One each was implanted in a surrogate mare, but only one of the pregnancies took.