Gord Irwin won't forget the first time he saw his prize filly. She was small. Really small.
Today, Irwin's horse will contest the three-year-old filly pacer bracket at the Breeders Crown at Woodbine.
The horse already has won Irwin and his partner, Murray Ross, $941,000 without once leaving the province.
Irwin, a retired millwright at Oshawa's General Motors who lives in Cobourg, loves to tell the story of that first meeting.
He needed a microscope.
"It looked," he said, "like a satin-coloured contact lens and it was a perfect circle. It was life."
It was Invitro.
The process is called embryo transfer and of the 78 horses running in the eight-race Breeders Crown event, Invitro is the only horse so procured.
Invitro is the latest thing, the product of an egg from Irwin's mare, Keystone Trinidad, and the story gets a little graphic here.
The mare had been inseminated by supersstud Camluck in a most unromantic way. After 10 days, the egg was washed out of Keystone Trinidad's uterus, trapped in a tiny filter and put into a petri dish.
That's when Gord Irwin got that first look.
"He was," recalled Dr. Moira Gunn, the veterinarian who performed the procedure, "over the moon."
Clearly, he foresaw a horse that would win 11 of her 16 races, including seven in a rowat Woodbine.
The rest of the process was, by today's mores, pretty standard. Gunn and the staff at Armstrong Bros., the leading producer of standardbred race horses in the province, selected a broodmare named Brannigan to carry the fertilized egg.
Eleven months later, Invitro arrived as a smallish foal but still considerably bigger than the last time Irwin had seen her.
A foal's DNA is set at conception, so there is no conflict between the blood of the mare that carries it and the foal's.
The process came to light in the 1980s but a discouraging lack of live births dampened enthusiasm for the process.
Now, as they say at the end of the American drug ads, embryo transfer is not for everyone.
For one thing, it's not cheap.
You've got to rent the womb. That cost $8,500. The procedure itself cost only a couple of thousand but Camluck's stud fee clocked in at $12,000.
Then again, when you consider Invitro's winnings to date, it looks like a bargain.
"Typically," Gunn said, "this is useful for a top-end filly whose owners wish to continue racing or a high quality broodmare who can't deliver her foal to term."
Keystone Trinidad earned Irwin and Ross, who lives near Norwood, $160,000.
Naturally enough, they didn't want to lay up their horse for a year.
"She was racing and racing good," Irwin said. "If we take an embryo, we don't lose any racing time. That's why we did it."
Invitro drew the No. 5 hole for today's race and is listed as a 5-1 underdog behind Glowing Report (7-2) and the spectacular Rainbow Blue (3-5). Invitro, the product of genetic gerrymandering, is two hands smaller than Rainbow Blue, an American horse conceived the good old fashioned way.
Still, Irwin and Ross thought enough of their horse to post an $80,000 supplement. That's big money for a couple of retired guys but the two, friends for 30 years, say they have the horse of their lifetime.
As for the ethics of the thing, Gord Irwin takes a millwright's view of progress. Sooner or later, something better will always come down the line.
"There's so much going on, cloning, cell stem research, it seems to be never ending," Irwin said. "But if it's progress, real progress, then I'm for it."
