Word: sperm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years since the birth of Louise Brown, the world's first test-tube baby, thousands of would-be parents have been assured that as far as scientists knew there was no extra risk of genetic damage associated with in-vitro fertilization, or IVF. No matter how sperm meets egg--whether in a woman's body or in a Petri dish (and even if the sperm needs some help getting inside the egg)--nature is equally vigilant about preventing serious genetic mishaps from coming to term. With those assurances, test-tube births have soared from a few hundred a year...
...children--she is reportedly pregnant again, this time with twins--are likely to be raised by a single parent. But this is true for 1 in 4 children, and it has become an accepted medical practice to help widows become pregnant through artificial insemination with the late husband's sperm. Those who feel that having a baby is a basic human right argue that this couple behaved in an especially ethical way by going to such effort and expense to ensure that their children would be born free of the disease. In this sense the case is comparable to that...
...Cook dismisses this idea of isolating Ivy League donors as silly, citing the Nobel Laureate sperm bank as a poorly conceived idea. “I don’t think there’s ever been a situation where the offspring of a Nobel Laureate has won a Nobel Prize,” he says. “People don’t quite understand genetics,” he says with slight frustration...
...maybe it should have been. The largest sperm bank in the country, the Boston-based New England Cryogenic Center, doesn’t even house an egg donation program. Clinic spokesperson Chris Arnone says that even with the potential for financial gain, it’s not worth the risk. “There’s a huge fear factor just because a woman’s body might be messed up from all the medication—five months of drugs—she would have to take,” he says. For men, donating sperm...
Although the intricacies of the stolen-genetic-material plot can be more tedious than frightening, the book’s premise is not completely divorced from reality. According to Arnone, colleges have long been a major resource for fertility clinics and that his sperm bank solicits donations from many area schools, including Boston University, Northeastern and Harvard. Because the clinic accepts only 1 in 30 donors, clinic administrators feel that catering to students helps them streamline their stringent selection process. “Almost all of our donors come from colleges,” Arnone says. Unlike in Cook?...