Tag: sperm

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Multicultural IVF Call – Australia

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MULTICULTURAL donors are being called on to help fill a growing IVF demand for children from different racial backgrounds.

Demand for IVF is outstripping supply, resulting in a shortage of both sperm and eggs.

The shortage has prompted a new advertising campaign by award-winning clinic Tas IVF looking for donors.

And for the first time the clinic has called for multicultural donors.

Tas IVF director Bill Watkins said there was a growing number of people from different racial backgrounds, including people from the Middle East and India, wanting sperm and eggs. Read full article.

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Ottawa Doctor Inseminates Wrong Sperm

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In Ottawa Canada, a renowned fertility specialist Dr. Norman Barwin allegedly artificially inseminated three women with the wrong sperm. Barwin currently volunteered to surrender his license which is now restricted.

In 1985, a woman went to Barwin to be inseminated with her husbands sperm, which had been frozen prior to starting cancer treatments. Later giving birth to a baby boy, later to discover the child was not her husbands. Read full article.

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Here’s Why You Really Do Need a Man

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Hanna Rosin’s new book, “The End of Men”, has people talking. In her book, Rosin argues that women are adapting better to modern society than men are – moving into new jobs and new careers.

It’s an issue that touches a lot of nerves. Are men really necessary? Despite research out this week that suggests the answer is no, scientists say males are vital to the survival of the human race.

The study in question found that some snakes sometimes have “virgin births” without any male input. Read full article.

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Sperm Precursor Cells Made in Lab Could One Day Restore Male Fertility

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(Medical Xpress)—Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) and human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) can be coaxed into becoming precursor sperm cells, suggesting that it might be possible one day to restore fertility for sterile males with an easily obtained skin sample, according to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Their findings are available today in the online version of Cell Reports. Read full article.
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Sperm ‘Grown’ From Skin Cells Could Help Male Fertility

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A breakthough in aiding male infertility may have been made as researchers ‘grow’ early stage sperm from human skin cells.

Scientists at University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine carried out research to see whether they could induce adult cells and make them develop as a different type of cell.

The findings could greatly help male infertility and the increase the chance of childhood cancer sufferers being able to father children. Read full article.

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In sperm world, slow and steady wins the race

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New York: Scientists have discovered that it is not the fastest swimming sperm that is most likely to succeed in fertilising the egg but the slower and longer one.

Researchers from Syracuse University found that in sperm competition in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) slower and longer sperms outcompete their faster rivals.

The research team led by Stefan Lupold, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Biology in the College of Arts and Sciences made the discovery using fruit flies that were genetically altered so that the heads of their sperm glow fluorescent green or red under the microscope.

“Sperm competition is a fundamental biological process throughout the animal kingdom, yet we know very little about how ejaculate traits determine which males win contests,” Lupold said in a statement.

“This is the first study that actually measures sperm quality under competitive conditions inside the female, allowing us to distinguish the traits that are important in each of the reproductive phases,” he added.

The study was published in the journal Current Biology.

Read full article.

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Frozen Sperm Offer a Lifeline for Coral

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COCONUT ISLAND, Hawaii — Just before sunset, on the campus of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, Mary Hagedorn waited for her mushroom corals to spawn.

As corals go, Fungia is fairly reliable, usually releasing its sperm and eggs two days after the full moon. Today was Day 3. “Sometimes we get skunked,” she fretted.

The recalcitrant corals sat outdoors in water-filled glass dishes, arranged in rows on a steel lab table. Each was about the size and shape of a portobello mushroom cap, with a sunburst of brown ribs radiating from a pink, tightly sealed mouth.
As Dr. Hagedorn and her assistant watched, one coral tightened its mouth and seemed to exhale, propelling a cloud of sperm into its bath with surprising vigor. The water bubbled like hot oatmeal.

A reproductive physiologist with the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Hagedorn, 57, is building what is essentially a sperm bank for the world’s corals. She hopes her collection — gathered in recent years from corals in Hawaii, the Caribbean and Australia — will someday be used to restore and even rebuild damaged reefs.

She estimates that she has frozen one trillion coral sperm, enough to fertilize 500 million to one billion eggs. In addition, there are three billion frozen embryonic cells; some have characteristics of stem cells, meaning they may have the potential to grow into adult corals.

Read full article.

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Sperm Sequencing Could Help Fight Infertility

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Not all sperm are created equal. The first genetic comparison of individual sperm cells has revealed just how diverse they can be. The technology used to study these tiny cells might also be used to study cancer and allow doctors to screen eggs for in vitro fertilisation.

To investigate how much variety there is in one man’s sperm, Stephen Quake, Jianbin Wang and their colleagues at Stanford University in California compared sperm cells from a single semen sample.

Analysing the genes of individual cells is notoriously tricky, though. “It’s hard to express how difficult single cell experiments are,” says Adam Auton at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. To perform genetic sequencing, you need to amplify, or make lots of copies of the genes within a cell to have enough to analyse. The compounds needed for amplification produce chemical by-products that can make the analysis more difficult.

Read full article.

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Three Men Want to Know How Their Frozen Sperm Was Destroyed

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Three men who claim their sperm was destroyed while it was being stored by Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation filed an emergency motion today to protect records and to inspect the hospitals’ cryopreservation system.

The men had their sperm frozen because they suffer from illnesses or were facing medical treatment that could make them infertile, lawyers for Corboy & Demetrio said today in a press release.
In one case, a 33-year-old suffered from leukemia and was told radical chemotherapy treatment would likely make him sterile. In a second case, a 26-year-old who suffers from an illness that could render him sterile preserved his sperm because he planned to one day become a husband and a father, according to the release.

The third man, 48, preserved his sperm because he also suffers from a condition that could make him sterile.

On April 21 and 22 — a Saturday and a Sunday — a cryogenic storage tank used for long-term storage of sperm samples malfunctioned and a round-the-clock alarm system attached to the unit failed to alert technicians, according to a press release from the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation. The press release said the information in it is attributable to Dr. Phillip Roemer, the chief medical officer of the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation.

Read full article.