Sperm

Sometimes men are the ones to take care of birth control through a surgical procedure. But when those men and their partners have a change of heart about children for any number of reasons, they seek to reverse their vasectomies. And that's usually possible, even long after the original procedure, says Dr. Brad Lerner, co-director of the Vasectomy Reversal Center of America a division of Chesapeake Urology. Lerner answers questions about getting and reversing a vasectomy. How common are vasectomies?

Were you paying close attention during all those awkward “birds and the bees” talks and sex education lessons? If not it's OK, because you're about to go download a game for free (on sale from $.99) that will obliterate everything you would've picked up anyway. “Sperm Wars” is a sort of turn-based RPG where you fight other sperm cells for reproductive dominance. Why you're not trying to fertilize an egg is anyone's guess, but then again, this game was so confusing that maybe I didn't get that far. To start off, you're shown a map of the world that makes the game seem a little like “Risk.” For reasons unknown, North America is locked to me, and you have to choose “attacking” a territory off the coast of Africa.

When 35-year-old Roxane Helstrom was shopping for sperm a year ago, she and her husband turned to their trusty catalog and, after some debate, selected Sperm Donor No. 522 -- a blond, blue-eyed student whose interests include filmmaking and writing."

Sometimes men are the ones to take care of birth control through a surgical procedure. But when those men and their partners have a change of heart about children for any number of reasons, they seek to reverse their vasectomies. And that's usually possible, even long after the original procedure, says Dr. Brad Lerner, co-director of the Vasectomy Reversal Center of America a division of Chesapeake Urology. Lerner answers questions about getting and reversing a vasectomy. How common are vasectomies?

LOS ANGELES -- A woman whose lover willed her 15 vials of his frozen semen before committing suicide asked a state appellate court to overturn a judge's order that the sperm be destroyed.But the dead man's ex-wife contends in the case before the 2nd District Court of Appeal that it would be unwise for society to permit a dead man to father a child.Attorneys say William Everett Kane spent six weeks preparing for his suicide Oct. 30, 1991, in a Las Vegas hotel, including making a bequest that his sperm be given to his girlfriend, Deborah Ellen Hecht, 38, so she could get pregnant.

The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank By David Plotz. Random House. Random House, 288 pages, $24.95. The idea had a certain eccentric appeal: asking the world's smartest men to donate sperm for the evolutionary betterment of mankind. But it also represented certain drawbacks, and not just the image of Nobel Prize winners walking down hallways with plastic cups and Playboys. There were also inevitable fears about the creation of a genetically engineered master race.

The simple act of making sperm substantially shortens a mal worm's life span, a researcher has discovered in results that overturn accepted biological dogma about the relative cheapness of a male's ejaculation compared with the preciousness of a female's egg.The scientist studying simple but revealing worms called nematodes found that males live much shorter lives than their mates, and he has traced that discrepancy to sperm production.When he experimentally manipulated males so they lost their capacity to make sperm while retaining their taste for intercourse, the altered nematodes lived at least 50 percent longer than the normal, fertile males.

BOULDER, Colo. -- At the age of 28, Greg Wiatt was living in Boulder, messed up and abusing drugs.He had been a gifted student in his Midwestern school, with an IQ of 167. But the disparity between him and his father, who had an IQ of 90, and was shorter and thinner than his tall, strapping blond son, was causing acute anxiety for the boy.The feelings intensified as Greg got older. His parents drifted apart and eventually divorced. When his father had a stroke, Greg became his sole guardian.

DENVER -- In research that seems to blur the line between fact and fiction, scientists have discovered it is possible to use dead sperm to create live offspring.Such experiments are fundamentally changing the definition of "fertility." The new technology means that in some cases -- where reproduction was not possible -- healthy offspring can now be born.According to reproductive physiologist Kazufumi Goto of Kagoshima University in Japan, his experiments have succeeded in producing live, normal calves by injecting single, dead sperm cells directly into mature eggs.

A new technique for freezing sperm-producing tissues can provide "biological immortality" for males, a finding that researchers say could have major impact on conserving endangered species, protecting research animals and preserving the reproduction ability of males who undergo intensive chemotherapy for cancer.The technique might even make it possible for men with abnormally low sperm production to reproduce.Fertility specialists now routinely freeze sperm itself, but the freezing process is tricky and unique for each species.

If you wanted to use your late husband's frozen sperm to have a baby, you would need his written permission under legislation that appears poised for approval in the Maryland General Assembly. The House and Senate have both passed bills that would make it illegal to use a dead person's preserved genetic material to reproduce without the notarized, written agreement of the donor. The legislation seeks to bring clarity to an area of the law that has been murky since the first test-tube babies were conceived.

It's a great time to be a jimmy in the Chesapeake Bay - if you're a blue crab looking for a good time.  There are nearly three times as many female crabs as there are males now, thanks to catch limits imposed by Maryland and Virginia to protect more "sooks" from harvest. Those catch limits, which included banning winter crabbing in Virginia and shortening the season in Maryland, are widely credited with fueling a dramatic rebound in the population of the iconic crustacean, which only four years ago was believed to be dangerously close to crashing because of overharvesting.

Hard times are especially hard on pregnant women. Miscarriages go up, as do premature births. The result: fewer baby boys. Economist Ralph Catalano, professor at the School of Public Health of University of California, Berkeley, showed the connection for the first time in a 2003 paper in the journal Human Reproduction. Researchers have known, based on studies going back to the 1970s, that war and environmental disasters can affect the sex ratio, which normally averages out to about half the babies born being boys and half girls.

Leviathan The History of Whaling in America By Eric Jay Dolin W.W. Norton / 480 pages / $27.95 On Jan. 3, 1841, a 21-year-old schoolteacher named Herman Melville set sail aboard the Acushnet, a Yankee whale ship headed for the South Seas. After 15 grueling months, Melville jumped ship in the cannibal-infested Marquesas Islands, figuring that even being eaten would be better than life on a whaler. Still, this failed voyage had a remarkable effect on American culture. Inspired by true stories of vengeful whales - particularly the sinking of the Essex by an enraged sperm whale and the exploits of an albino whale nicknamed Mocha Dick, legendary for his ferocious attacks on whale ships off Chile - Melville's tale of Captain Ahab's suicidal obsession with killing the white whale Moby-Dick has become a symbol of humankind's doomed struggle to subdue nature.

In the world of gender politics, death is the latest measure of parity. Not only do women outlive men, but recent research shows they're also being born more often than in the past. The allegedly stronger sex, it turns out, is really the weaker and more vulnerable - from conception until death do us part. Nature has always seen to it that about 105 males were born for every 100 females, but that ratio has been shifting the past three decades, possibly owing to environmental pollution as well as to stressful current events.

Men whose mothers ate a lot of beef during their pregnancy have a sperm count about 25 percent below normal and three times the normal risk of fertility problems, researchers reported this week. The problem may be because of anabolic steroids used in the United States to fatten the cattle, Dr. Shanna H. Swan of the University of Rochester Medical Center reported in the journal Human Reproduction. It could also be because of pesticides and other environmental contaminants, she said. If the sperm deficit is related to the hormones in beef, Swan's findings may be "just the tip of the iceberg," wrote biologist Frederick vom Saal of the University of Missouri- Columbia in an editorial accompanying the paper.

Men living in agricultural mid-Missouri are markedly less fertile than men living in New York, Minneapolis and Los Angeles, researchers at the University of Missouri-Columbia have found. The researchers suspect that runoff from farm chemicals may be to blame. The results "are important to couples that are trying to conceive," said research professor Shanna Swan, who led the study. "If we can find out what specific exposures were related to this reduced semen quality, we might be able to prevent delays in conception in the future."

LOS ANGELES -- William Kane spelled it all out in his will before he killed himself in a Las Vegas hotel suite last year.His two children would get the 7 1/2 acres of land in Monterey, Calif.His first cousin would get $30,000.His girlfriend, Deborah Hecht, would get everything else, most notably a dozen vials of Mr. Kane's frozen sperm on deposit at a Los Angeles sperm bank.Friends say that Mr. Kane, a brilliant man whose life swirled -- at least in his mind -- with hints of military and diplomatic intrigue, was too tired and depressed to go on living, but nonetheless wanted to have a child with the woman he had lived with for five years.

BOSTON -- By now, Mary Cheney must have inspired an entirely new chapter in What to Expect When You're Expecting. Expect your pregnancy to provoke a national controversy. It's been years since the vice president's Openly Gay Daughter first created a stir on the right for her sexual preference and a stir on the left for her political preference. Now her "bump," as all celebrity pregnancies are described, is fodder for the sort of uncontrolled food fight she'll find all too familiar in another year or so. Her opponents criticize her as a single mommy and as one of two mommies.

A flurry of new genetic and epidemiological studies is chipping away at a prized male myth: Sperm, it turns out, don't age as well as some men imagine. At least 20 exceedingly rare but potentially devastating genetic disorders, including dwarfism and other skeletal deformities, have now been linked to older fathers. Men who have families later in life also have a higher risk of fathering children with schizophrenia, studies show. And in the latest reality check, researchers reported last week that men over 40 are nearly six times as likely to have an autistic child as those under 30. "The conventional wisdom is clearly inaccurate: Men have as important a biological clock as women for having healthy babies," says Dr. Dolores Malaspina of Columbia University, one of several researchers of this "paternal age" effect.