Word: sperm
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...February of this year, at the University of Minnesota Hospital and Clinic in Minneapolis, eggs taken from Christa's ovaries were fertilized with her husband Kevin Uchytil's sperm, then implanted in Arlette's uterus. Ten days later, Arlette telephoned her daughter and son-in-law, who live in Sioux City, Iowa. "Congratulations!" she triumphantly exclaimed. "You're pregnant." Not long thereafter, Christa, viewing an ultrasound picture of her mother's tummy, saw two heartbeats and realized that her mother would give birth to twins. "How lucky could I be!" Christa said. "This just takes my breath away...
FORENSIC SCIENCE. Amplified by PCR, the DNA in a single sperm cell can link a suspect to a rape victim. Theoretically, a single epithelial cell found in saliva can be traced back to the person who, say, licked a stamp on a letter bomb. In California's San Mateo County, charges against a man arrested and jailed for a brutal rape were dropped in 1988 after a PCR test showed he could not have been the attacker. A year later another man was arrested in another rape case. Not only did a DNA marker make him a suspect...
...gulf crisis has brought an increase in business for sperm banks. Many couples decided to have the husbands' sperm frozen before the men went off to war, so that their legacy would endure even if they were injured or killed. The San Diego branch of the Fertility Center of California, not far from the Camp Pendleton Marine base, has set up accounts for 100 military couples over the past few months. But with so many troops shipped out, the pace has slowed. Explains a spokeswoman for the center: "There are very few young men left in town...
...based on one central assumption: that exposure to dangerous substances is most likely to occur inside the wombs of mothers- to-be. A series of studies has raised the possibility that the fault can sometimes lie with the father. Poisons in a man's body may silently damage his sperm and thus lead to birth defects...
Researchers have long known that certain poisons can produce so-called dominant lethal effects in men. In these cases, the sperm is so damaged that it fails either to fertilize the egg or to produce a viable embryo. But little was known about whether toxins could trigger more insidious defects in the sperm -- problems subtle enough to allow the birth of the child but still harmful enough to produce serious malformations. Perhaps the most disturbing recent report concerns lead, which had been shown to impair fetal growth when mothers were exposed while pregnant. At a meeting last month...