Word: sperms
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...VIRGIN MOUSE: Two eggs (hold the sperm) create a unique rodent...
...beautiful princess who came from the moon and was born inside a bamboo stalk. Today, at the Tokyo University of Agriculture, Kaguya's namesake is a 14-month-old mouse whose conception is every bit as fantastic: she was created by scientists using two eggs and no sperm. As reported in the journal Nature last week, that makes Kaguya the first mouse born by parthenogenesis (from the Greek for virgin birth), a reproductive method seen in insects and reptiles but never before in mammals...
...other things being equal, an embryo must have both a maternal genomic imprint (usually from an egg) and a paternal genomic imprint (usually from a sperm), or it won't grow properly. If it has two paternal imprints, the placenta grows but not the embryo. If it has two maternal imprints, the embryo grows but not the supporting placenta. Defects in imprinting in humans are thought to contribute to such neurodevelopmental ailments as Prader-Willi syndrome and perhaps some forms of autism. Genes that have lost their imprinting have also shown up in brain tumors...
While most egg donors receive a few thousand dollars in compensation for the process (sperm donors only make a paltry hundred), Ivy League girls are the crème de la crème of the egg donation pool and routinely earn five-digit compensations...
...response to a question about where to draw the line between improvements in human health and designer genes, Sandel brought up the example of a man that tried to create a super-race by soliciting sperm from winners of the Nobel prize before the creation of Viagra...