Sperm

THERE WAS a time when an infertile couple had only two choices: Remain childless or adopt. Now, the choices are both numerous and bewildering.A woman can undergo in vitro fertilization, using her own egg and her husband's sperm. She can be artificially inseminated with the sperm of another man. Or a man can use his sperm to fertilize the egg from another woman, with embryo implanted in his wife's uterus who will then carry the fetus and give birth.The latter option neatly circumvents the problems that can arise with a surrogate mother.

NEW YORK -- Kathy Butler, a 47-year-old New Jersey woman, is pregnant with triplets. But the babies bear no relationship to her or to her husband, Gary. They are growing from ready-made embryos that the Butlers selected and paid for at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan.Doctors at the medical center had mixed human eggs and sperm to make a variety of embryos with different pedigrees. Then they froze the embryos. The idea was to allow prospective parents to select embryos whose parents resemble them physically or have the same ethnic background and are well educated -- the best possible sperm and egg donors for those who cannot have babies of their own.The Butlers are part of a quiet but fast-emerging new world of assisted reproduction in the United States.

A sick female pygmy sperm whale died yesterday morning at the National Aquarium in Baltimore -- 16 hours after being brought to the city to be nursed back to health.The 670-pound whale, discovered with her calf nearly two weeks ago on a beach in Virginia, was brought to the aquarium Tuesday after 12 days at Virginia Marine Science Museum in Virginia Beach.Dr. Brent Whitaker, the aquarium's staff veterinarian, said the whale died about 5: 30 a.m. yesterday, not long after a short period of brisk swimming in the aquarium's isolation tank, after a seven-hour period of inactivity.

Thies Christophersen,79, a former Nazi who published literature denying the Holocaust ever happened, died Thursday in Kiel, Germany. He had been sought by authorities for a decade before he was arrested last month. He was released because he was suffering from advanced kidney cancer and was too sick to be jailed.He was an SS officer and a guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. He published the pamphlet "The Farming Community," extolling his book "The Auschwitz Lie," which denies Germany exterminated millions of Jews during World War II.Robert Klark Graham,90, who believed intelligence could be bred and established a sperm bank that originally accepted sperm only from Nobel Prize winners, died Thursday in San Diego while attending a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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.

Boston. -- How do you describe the theft of a human egg? The kidnapping of an embryo? The abduction of reproduction?Start by imagining, if you will, that you are an infertile couple who wanted a biological child badly enough to go through the expense, the indignities, the emotional and hormonal roller coaster of in-vitro fertilization. Imagine the month-by-month hopes and disappointments.Imagine discovering years later that you do have a child. A boy born to another couple from your egg and possibly your sperm.

DAVID BLANKENHORN has a question: Why isn't there some debate about the fact that American sperm banks sell sperm to single women?As usual, the elite culture in America will hear this question in one way; the rest of the country will hear it differently.Elite response: Here comes another at tack on privacy and individual rights.Rest of the country: Why is it so obvious that a wide-open commercial market in the production of fatherless children is a social good?Mr. Blankenhorn is head of the Institute for American Values in Manhattan.

It has made dreams come true for thousands of previously childless couples, and provides a lifeline of hope for many more. It is in-vitro fertilization, a process that has become commonplace within the last several decades.Today, IVF is in the public eye mostly when multiple births -- such as quadruplets or quintuplets -- result. Still, confusion remains as to how the process works, how often it works and who stands to benefit the most from its possibilities.For the answers to these questions, I consulted Dr. Anne Namnoum, director of Assisted Reproductive Technology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Boston -- The lawmakers of Louisiana never planned for the parentage of Judith Hart. When they wrote the laws of legitimacy, any child born to a widow a year after her husband's death would have been cause for scandal, not for celebration.But technology has raced ahead of their law. Today when men can deposit their sperm for safekeeping in a bank before they go off to war or to do battle against illness, Judith Hart's origins do not seem so strange.In 1990, when Ed Hart was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus, he had every wish to live.

The "miracle of childbirth" is preceded by a lot of other crucial miracles that enable this wondrous event to take place. Chief among these is conception. For women and their partners who have had little or no trouble conceiving, it may be hard to appreciate the frustration and heartbreak felt by couples who do have difficulty becoming pregnant.Fortunately, for many of these people, there are several courses of treatment, including one long-standing option, artificial insemination. For the details on this technique, I consulted Dr. Anne Namnoum, director of assisted reproductive technology in the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.