Word: ovum
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...Night-Sea Journey" is a monologue of a spermatazoa on its way to the ovum. It is amusing, and, unlike the other stories, is about love, however abstractly that compact may be presented. There is, though, a basic flaw in the piece: In fantastic literature, the author is allowed to make any conditions he likes, but once these are established, the action must be within their limits. The reader will allow Barth to allow a spermatazoa to meditate, but he cannot allow that spermatazoa to record theories about his purpose (correct in every detail)--which theories no spermatazoa could ever...
...immobility is attributed to the entire female constitution by analogy with the supposed immobility of the ovum.... In actuality, each month the ovum undertakes an extraordinary expedition,...an unseen equivalent of going down the Mississippi on a raft or over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Ordinarily too, the ovum travels singly, like Lewis or Clark, in the kind of existential loneliness which Norman Mailer usually admires. One might say that the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd...
...concern was to help subfertile couples to have normal babies. Now he has come to believe, as have other embryologists and physiologists, that an unusually high incidence of abnormal births may result from couples' using the rhythm method for birth control and miscalculating the date of ovulation. An ovum may remain fertile for at least two days, and sperm for about 36 hours. Cross says that in the first half of the ovulation cycle, a stale sperm may fertilize a normal egg, and in the second half, a normal sperm may fertilize a stale egg. Either way, he believes...
...woman to have 46 chromo somes per cell: 22 pairs of autosomes, which determine countless characteristics other than sex, and two gonosomes or sex chromosomes. In the female, these are a pair of Xs; in the male, an X and a Y (see diagram). When a sperm fertilizes an ovum, each supplies half the 46 chromosomes for the combination of cells that will grow into a baby. If the sperm contains an X chromosome, the baby gets that X plus one from the mother, and will be an XX girl. If the sperm contains a Y chromosome, the baby gets...
...months to years before the respiratory and vasomotor centers fail. At the same time one can share Schreiner's (1966, p. 100) disconent and insist that "a coordinating vital principle exists which is either there or not there." This vital principle comes into being when the sperm fertilizes the ovum and persists until life no longer is present. The moment of death can only be approximated...