Word: sperm
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...California urologist has developed a procedure that could make vasectomy, or male sterilization, more easily reversible. Most surgeons perform the operation by removing a section of the vas deferens, the tubes that carry sperm. Some men later change their minds, but fertility frequently cannot be restored. Dr. Stanwood Schmidt of the University of California San Francisco Medical Center has a different approach. Removing no tissue and sealing the center of the severed vas by electric cauterization, he leaves the muscular wall of the tube intact. To reverse the procedure, Schmidt simply removes the scar tissue and rejoins the tube. Schmidt...
...search of it, of whatever it is that binds random events together to make lives, he regards with wonder his wife, his stepchildren, his potted palm, his parents and even his ineffectual sperm (under his doctor's microscope they wriggle torpidly, like sunbathers). "Singer's wife is washing Singer's socks in the kitchen sink and weeping prodigally," a fairly typical episode begins. "Singer watches . . . He pays attention to the great, submerged tangle of black socks, mid-calf length; his wife's red, vehement face; her tears dropping at intervals into the murky water. He thinks...
...also subject to penalty. Rape would continue to be punishable insofar as it is defined as forcible penetration, because such a definition involves a physical characteristic unique to one sex and so "does not deny equal rights to the other sex." (Similarly, civil regulation of wet nurses or sperm donors would be permissible.) Statutory-rape laws concerning voluntary intercourse would probably be taken off the books, though both young boys and young girls could still be protected against any sexual abuse by older persons...
...source not a geneticist but a woman psychoanalyst. The fallacious reasoning behind the claim is that since human fetuses start out without male genitalia. they are physically female. The fact is that sex is determined at the moment of fertilization by the combination of chromosomes contained in the sperm and egg. One may as well argue that because new fetuses of mice and men are similar, all men start out as rodents...
Human cloning, the asexual reproduction of genetic carbon copies, raises similar questions. Who shall be cloned, and why? Great scientists? Composers? Statesmen? When Geneticist Hermann J. Muller first broached the idea of sperm banks in Out of the Night (1935), he suggested Lenin as a sperm donor. In later editions, Lenin was conspicuously absent, replaced on Muller's list by Leonardo da Vinci, Descartes, Pasteur, Lincoln and Einstein. Society could well be as fickle?or worse?about cloning. It might create a caste of subservient workers, as in 1984, or a breed of super-warriors out of a "genetics race...