Denmark: Ole Schou was 27 years old when he had a dream. It was 1981 and he was a graduate student at a business school in the Danish city of Aarhus.
In the dream, Schou saw an icy blue sea and, caught in the waves, hundreds of frozen sperm. “It was such a peculiar dream that I could not forget it,” he recalls, “so sometime later I walked into the university library and asked for any literature on sperm and fertility.”
Schou started reading and became obsessed. “My dream had given me another dream,” Schou says. “I was going to build a sperm bank.”
That dream came true. Cryos, the company Schou started up 25 years ago this month, is today the world’s largest sperm bank. Schou estimates that Cryos has been responsible for more than 30,000 births, producing more than 2,000 babies a year, and in what has been called a new Viking invasion the company exports sperm to more than 70 countries. Cryos and similar companies, such as the European Sperm Bank, have helped turn Denmark into the sperm capital of the world. Read full article.
