Word: semen
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Severed Circle. As a technical procedure, however, vasectomy is simplicity itself. After administering a local anesthetic, the doctor locates the vas deferens, the thin (3-mm. diameter) tube that carries sperm from the testicle to the seminal vesicle, where it is mixed with other components of the semen (see diagram). Once he has found it, he makes a small incision, draws out the vas and severs it, often removing a small section and tying the ends back on each other so that they cannot rejoin. He then repeats the procedure on the other side. The operation, which costs...
Some bank. The bankbook is called The Semen Depositor's Handbook. Along with it comes a brown glass bottle, for deposits. "No appointment is necessary," says the handbook, adding, in capital letters, that "IT IS IMPORTANT THAT THE EJACULATE SHOULD NOT BE OVER TWO HOURS OLD." Home collection, the booklet notes, is preferred, but the bank also maintains its own ejaculatorium in Manhattan (with, as Executive Vice President Dr. Jerome A. Silbert notes, "various levels of erotica to assist"). What do the bankers do with the deposits? They freeze them. Frozen assets, as it were...
There are still other categories: anonymous donors whose sperm will be used for artificially inseminating women who cannot otherwise become pregnant, and would-be fathers whose semen will be consolidated in an attempt to raise their sperm count to a level high enough to cause pregnancy. And there are also a few simple eccentrics-like the Midwestern grandfather who has stored his seed against the possibility that his only son might prove infertile and thus not carry on the family line...
...Idant each deposit is carefully analyzed and a sampling of the sperm counted in an electronic device to establish the semen's degree of fertility. The semen is then stored in thin plastic "straws," labeled, placed within a cigar-shaped aluminum container and chilled to -321° F. in liquid nitrogen. Sperm banks are inordinately careful to guard against unauthorized use of their resources. Donors are blood-typed, for instance, because certain substances are common to both individual sperm and blood and thus serve to identify "ownership" of the substance...
...partial answer. In a series of papers published recently in the scientific journal Nature, they report that aspirin and its close pharmaceutical relatives tend to halt the production of prostaglandins, hormone-like substances first discovered in the 1930s. Although their exact role is still incompletely understood, prostaglandins occur in semen, menstrual fluid and a wide variety of human tissues. They are known to be involved with the functions of such diverse structures as the heart, bronchial tubes, blood vessels and stomach...