Radiolab - Sperm

Episode Date: December 1, 2008

Sperm carry half the genes needed for human life. In this hour of Radiolab, some basic questions and profound thoughts about reproduction.

You're listening to Radio Lab from Public Radio, W-N-Y-C and N-P-R. Hello. Hello. Today I want to start the show by telling you about a guy, well, a very, very, very important man. Probably one of the most important guys in... Guidem. Yeah. Okay, tell me the correct pronunciation on...

Leo... On the Dutch. Leukenhokin? The way that you should say is something like Leavenhook. And here, thankfully, to help with our pronunciation and to fill in the details is Professor Matthew Cobb. I'm the program director for zoology at the University of Manchester. Levenhook. And I've written a book about this called Generation, the 17th century scientists who unraveled the secrets of sex, life and growth.

Okay, so Leavenhook. Yeah, that's fine. Okay. So what did he do? He was a draper. A draper? Yeah, so he just sold cloth. Oh.

He had no scientific training whatsoever. He was interested in microscopes. Why would a draper be interested in microscopes? It was his hobby. It's what he did. He made these microscopes. And he was actually really good. That's right.

Although you have to keep in mind that microscopes at that point in time, talking 1670s here, it's not exactly how we think of them now. Back then, they were just... Tiny balls of glass. And that's it. And science itself was just a wee little baby. You've got to just really put yourself back. Okay, there was Lavin Hook doing really well with these microscopes,

and pretty soon, scientists all over the place were asking you to look at stuff. For example, what's in blood or what's in sweat or what's in semen? Dun-dun-dun. This is where it does get rather sordid. Okay, so... Jay, before you... This is a point where we should tell our audience that some of the references from here on in will be a bit graphic if you don't want to hear that kind of stuff.

No, if you don't want to hear that stuff, now go out to the garden and, you know, Check out the rabbits. Okay. No, getting back to the story, it's 1667, just imagine. And Luthunhoek has just received a letter from the Royal Society of London, this big group of scientists, asking him to take a look at a drop of humans seamen. To see what's in there. And not to be graphic. But one autumn day.

Autumn, 1677. He is in his bedroom. Having conjugal relations with his wife, Cornelia. He's got his microscope ready, plus a little vial. And then as he put it within six beats of the pulse after he ejackey, he was. He'd got the semen and he put it into this very thin capillary tube rushed over to the window. His wife's lying there thinking, well, what the hell are you doing? Not again. Come on, will you? Enough with the microscopes already.

And then he looks into the semen and he can clearly see that there's a thing, there's something in there. Some kind of small structure. He squints and he focuses and he can see all these wriggling things. It is just full, absolutely full, of these tiny eel-like things. He says a vast number of living animal cules. Animal cules? Their bodies were rounded and furnished with a long, thin tail. They moved with a snake-like motion of the tail as eels do when swimming in water.

Wow, so what was he thinking at this point? Do we know? I don't know. Putting myself in his place, I think, wow. Because here's the thing, at this point in time, people didn't really understand where babies came from. They knew it had something to do with sex, but the notion of heredity was still very fuzzy. And how a baby developed was a total mystery. What's life? How would you know if something's alive?

In those days, one of the main things that they associated with life was movement. If stuff moved, it was alive. So if movement is the key, you can imagine what Leavenhook must have been thinking. staring at these wriggling little beasts in the vial, because they moved. That's right. Oh boy, did they move. These things are trying to get somewhere.

They're thrashing. They're desperate. Maybe in this vial is the secret to life, to the soul. This is what people thought. It didn't take long before a pretty fantastic idea began to circulate, which is that not only is the sperm the vehicle of the soul,

but if you could somehow zoom all the way down into its little head, you would find in there. In there, a little man. Hello. Hello. This little chap all hunched up. A little tiny guy. Tiny human.

Thinking was that one day when the microscopes got better, you'd actually be able to see that tiny little human. With your own eyes. Because it had to be there. Because if the sperm was the sole source of life, then there must be something in there that look pretty much like a human being. One problem, though. What?

If you were one of these folks who believed that the sperm was the soul, Well, then you had to ask yourself. What does this say? About God, because it would mean he was creating all these souls, and then he was just wasting them. Leavenhurk did a calculation. He worked out that there were more semen, more spermatozoa, in an ejaculate of a cod.

He got a cod, and he opened it up, and saw how many sperm there must be in its ejaculate. And he said there are, he was pretty much right. There are more sperm in this ejaculate than there are human beings alive on the planet. And that's just in one cod. What? That's true?

Yeah. Holy moly. So you imagine all the men producing all this stuff all the time. That's an awful lot of souls, if they're all potential human beings, just dying. Well, all but one. How many sperm are in a human ejaculate? About 180 million. Oh, see, that's nothing these days.

Yeah, it's like Brooklyn. You just live there. All right, this is Radio Lab. I'm Chad. I'm Robert Crillwich. And our program today is about... By the way, 100. 180 million is still a lot.

It's not a lot. Considering that you only have a couple of eggs. Who has a cup of eggs? The lady has a couple of eggs. She's got a finite number, whereas the guy is making millions every day. Oh, right. That's right.

Anyhow, our program today is about sperm. Yep. Stick around. Okay, in all seriousness, before we get started for real, just want to tell you that this program does actually contain strong sexual material, nothing too graphic,

but this is your warning. Stick around. It'll be great. Okay, for those of us who we may, let's get back to our basic question. The why-so-many question? Yes. Why is there such a startling asymmetry

between the number of sexual cells produced by a male and the very relatively few eggs in the female? Well, of course, this is the question. I put the question to... One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine... Another... There's a lot of English people in this show today. I'm Tim Burkhead.

I work at the University of Sheffield in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences. And he is an expert on sperm... In birds. How do you choose this line of work? Ever since I was obsessed by birds I was also obsessed by sex

and I managed to combine the two into an academic career isn't that lucky And in any case he says this question of waste Why on earth did God make so many sperm It just didn't seem very sensible Well this question not only troubled the church It flummoxed science

Flummoxed is I think the right word It's like scientists for a very long time It really wasn't until about the 1970s that finally the large numbers of sperm that males transfer to females finally began to make sense. What happened in the 1970s? Well, before the 1970s, bird scientists assumed that if a female chose a spouse for the season, she would stick to the spouse for the season, she would be faithful. But in the 70s, when they looked a little more closely, they found there was more to this story.

Springtime in Somerset, the female bushy-tailed River Whirl is always present in wood. like this, always searching for that springtime joy of love. Her love song is very beautiful, as is his. Here he comes. And there is the act of love, consummated rather quickly. And now he's off to get his new sweetheart, a juicy worm. She's alone for a time, and she... Well, actually, she's hopping off to another branch where there seems to be another man.

She, of course, will remain loyal to this first partner. Copper type. Prior to the 1970s, if people saw females behaving promiscuously, they assumed that there was something wrong with them. What is wrong with this bird? Do you have another bird? Hey, Lance, have you got another bird? Hormone imbalances or some kind of misunderstanding. But then they discovered DNA fingerprinting.

The DNA test. Which provided a completely unequivocal test of paternity. They'd go to a nest, say, and look at the five eggs in the nest, test the DNA, and discover that some of those eggs came from different dads. Indicating that the female had mated with more than one male. One of these four men is the father, but she didn't know which one. DNA fingerprinting gave us the evidence that, in fact, the majority of animals, the females are

promiscuous. Really? I mean, this is like chimp babies, chickadey babies. Chipmunk babies. It's almost ubiquitous. Let's find out the truth. You are not the father. At the moment, I'm only talking about non-humans.

Right. But what does this female promiscuity thing have to do with the why so much sperm question? Everything. Everything, because once people understood that that was going on, well, then the level of competition between males gets actually much more complicated. What do you mean? Well, if I am chasing a lady, now not only do I have to worry about a competitor, but I have to worry about all the people I've never met who have been having sex with my girl. There's a whole level of...

Oh, you mean like the sperm is competing. The sperm is competing. Not just the makers of the sperm, but the sperm itself. The sperm itself. So there's outdoor competition, but now there's indoor competition. Exactly. If you get my drift. And one very effective way of competing is simply to produce more sperm than the next guy.

Okay, I think we need to step back a little bit. If females are promiscuous, natural selection is going to favor the male that wins and fertilizes that particular female's eggs. As a consequence of that, males have evolved the most staggering array of adaptations to minimize their own chances of being cuckolded. What does cuckolded mean?

Cuckolding means your wife is cheating, on you and you don't know it. Oh. So what he's saying is that animals will go to elaborate lengths to be not cheated on. In fact, let me give you three spectacular illustrations as never before heard on our program. We're going to begin, which includes most things, with sperm competition as displayed by first the Rove Beetle. Beatle!

These beetles are amazing. When the male beetle, the male Rove Beetle, has sex with a female. says Tim. They transfer the sperm in basically a package of sperm called a spermatoform. Once it's inside the female, it starts to swell and expand. Like a balloon? Yeah. In swelling and expanding, it pushes out or away any rival sperm.

Hey, hey, hey, but the sperm is stuck in a balloon. It's got to get out. Oh, yes, well, but the Lady Rove Beetle has. The little structure. A structure like a tooth that will puncture the spermatoport. Releasing the male's sperm.

No kidding. Yeah, it's kind of like science fiction. But if you think the Rove Beetle has got something going on, let's meet the dragonfly. In dragonflies, males have the most elaborate and bizarre penis. It's covered with backward-pointing spines, hundreds of backward-pointing spines.

spines. Kind of like, you know, bristles on a pipe cleaner? And a very clever guy called Jeff Waggi did a very clever experiment. He allowed male dragonflies to mate with females and separated them at different stages during their rather protracted copulation. And what he found was, halfway through the copulation, the male... Before he actually does the act, is actually removing his penis from the female, and it's covered with sperm from the previous male that inseminated that female. Oh, so he's brushing out the other guys. Exactly. That's rather shocking. But better still,

better still is the duck. The duck? The duck. Most birds don't have a penis, male birds. Ducks do. That's it? No? It goes on. Across different duck species, the penis size varies from

very small to about 14 inches, something absolutely astronomical on a relatively small duck. And the thing about but duck is, I don't quite know how to put this. Ducks engage in forced extra pair copulations. What he's really saying is that the males are, they're raping the females. Oof, wait, because the females have a strategy of their own.

A couple of years ago, we were dissecting a female duck, and a postdoc called Patty Brennan called me into the lab, and she said, look at this, I've just found this funny structure in the female's vagina. And what it was was a side branch. Meaning instead of one clear highway right to the egg, this one had a kind of... Off-ramp? Off-ramp. I phoned a colleague in France, who was a duck expert, and he said he'd never seen such a thing,

but give him 10 minutes and he'll go and check, so he obviously went off and dissected his own duck. Phoneed me back and said, my God, you're right. There it was an off-ramp in the French duck. By which time we'd finished our dissection, and in fact... When the British took a look at their duck... In the duck that we looked at, there were two or three separate side branches. Patty then went on to do a comparative study of a lot of different duck species. And what we found was that in species where the male had an enormous phallus,

the female had the most complex vagina we'd ever come across. Some had two or three side branches and a very long spiral, like a corkscrew at the end of the vagina. And if you think about it, what seems very likely here is that the female has got these structures to deflect the male. If she's being raped, she might contract. part of her reproductive tract to send the male off down a blind alley. If he avoids that, she can just tighten up this spiral, so his sperm can't get to the right

place. So what you've got here is a kind of warfare. The male says, all right, I'm coming in there, like it or not. And then the female is, well, you're getting nowhere, like it or not. Go female ducks. A remarkable case of females evolving counter adaptations to keep males' at arm's length. Or penis length.

So to speak. So this is Maverick and Buckles. They are African geese. The British male scientist section of our program is coming briefly to a pause so we can meet an American and a female. My name is Joanna Ellington. Joanna Ellington.

I'm a PhD in reproductive physiology. We spoke with her at her farm in Yes, Washington State. So we have 70 acres. here and I was a veterinarian before I did my PhD. You are an andrologist? Yes, an andrologist is study of male reproduction. Andro for man?

Anology is study of, yes. Where are the pigs? They're right, the pigs are over here sleeping. They're going to be bred today. We actually have semen flying in from Nebraska. We're going to go down here to the chicken coop. And while she's walking to the chicken coop, let me just say we finally come to a human sperm expert to ask about us. Yeah.

And? I mean, this competition thing, does it work like that with us? Ginger, ginger, no bark. Well, that's the real surprise to me. I mean, we've all seen the sex education films, you know, when you're in fourth or fifth grade. The woman's own defense system attacks the sperm. They are unwelcome cells from another organism, and they are potential enemies. But when Joanna gave me her version of all this, it was not like that at all.

Let me start from the beginning. First, the sperm have to get through the cervix. The woman's cervical mucus has a lot of fibers in it that are criss-crossed. So you'd think there'd be this big mesh. Barrier they couldn't get through. The barriers are numerous. But... When the woman ovulates, the hormones in her body,

make all those fibers in the cervical mucus line up. Oh. And they basically make a little highway that the sperm can swim through. Zip, zip, zip. Not only is she welcoming them in. She's making sure later that they don't get a lot. They are directed to the side that has the egg on it. Oh, because there's some tubes with eggs and some tubes without?

Right. One fallopian tube leads to the waiting egg, the other to an empty tube. Except for the woman's body says, over here, guys, this site. And most surprising of all is that halfway through the journey, there's a rest period in, it was called the fallopian tube. The fallopian tube says, oh, great, we know that you guys are here. We know that you're pretty fragile guys. So we're going to change the type of sugar proteins that we make. We're going to make sugar proteins that you're bathed in,

and you just hang out here until an egg comes. Oh, so we're now in the waiting room? Yes. And we're being sugar. Yes. This sounds nice. It is nice. Sounds like a little Roman moment.

Everybody's lying down and kind of getting a towel wash or something. They're very quiet at that point. Metabolically, they're quiet. The female is essentially telling them, they can live in the fallopian tube for two, three, four days, maybe even a week. A week? You're kidding. Until her egg is ready.

That's when she says. Hey, we just ovulated. You need to let the guys go. And the sperm are released and start swimming up the track. They swim in dense functions. To meet the eggs. In search of the eggs. And the rest of it, of course, you know.

I've never heard about the sugar room before. I mean, that seems like news. You had the in the fallopian to? Yeah. Yeah, neither had I. This had been discussed by scientists, but there was no evidence to prove that it was so. But Joanna. As a good scientist.

She was the first to provide the evidence, she said. After I had my last son, I told my doctor, I said, my husband and I are going to have intercourse. You are going to do my tube a ligation and cut out my tube, and we're going to get pictures. of the sperm stored in the human fallopian tube. So we did. So you counted your husband's guys. Yes. At the gate.

Yeah, there weren't very many there. Just a few. How many were there? He had about 20 in the fallopian tube that we looked at. Oh, man. That seems like a fragilely low number. Well, it is, but you have to remember that you only need one. Wow, that blows my mind.

I mean, that's like 20 little potential souls. Lost at the gate. The cool thing is that, yes, there is this level of competition still, but underneath there is this substrate of male-female cooperation. It's much more an active teamwork than one would have supposed. Hazel's sperm just arrived that I'd let you guys know. Oh. Come here, girls.

Pregnant, get pregnant. Yeah, they're going to get pregnant. Hazel, who's Hazel? How is that's her pet? Hazel. Is it a big box or what is it? It's a boy. styrofoam cooler.

Go ahead and scratch hazel's back, Sagey. We'll end up putting probably about a half a cup into hazel. Wow. How long did it take Mr. Pig to make a half a cup? Pigs make a lot of sperm. Robert. We've got to leave the farm. Not yet.

No, come on. Come on. We've got to go to break. Sorry. So you're going to miss some stuff about the pig. Radio Lab will continue in a moment. Message 1. Radio Lab is funded in part.

by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation. Radio Lab is produced by WNYC and distributed by National Public Radio. End of message. Hello, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwitch.

This is Radio Lab. Our topic today is... Sperm, actually. That's right. And what is a sperm, if not one teeny, tiny little dad? Oh, it's much more than that. It's a soul. It's everything.

Well, we're going to just leave you in the garage and turned to Kathleen Labonte, who a few years ago sat down to try to draw a picture of her dad, and this is the picture that she drew. I drew a picture of a sperm. It wasn't very impressive. It was like a cartoon sperm with blue eyes and brown hair and a little bit of a mustache. And then I had a really big question mark behind the sperm. And that was to represent the fact that I don't know this man's identity.

This might sound like your typical magic marker paints a sperm donor story, but it's really not. And here to tell us about it is reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro. Should I just kind of take it from the top? Yeah. Okay. Kathleen lives in Houston. And when she was eight, her mom began telling her rather repeatedly,

Kathleen, there's something special about you. And I really wasn't that curious, but she kept saying it so many times that eventually I just said, okay, what is it? me different. So she took me upstairs, sat me on my bed, and she just said that the man who raised you is not your biological father. We had to go to his sperm bank, and that a very nice man gave us his sperm, so that you could be born. And then she said that I could still consider my dad to be my father, even though he wasn't my biological father. Right afterwards, I just ran downstairs, and I threw my arms around my dad's neck, and he was on the computer, and I just told him that I left

him. He didn't know that I had just been told that I wasn't his biological daughter. So she just took it in and it was a source of joy for her initially. It felt kind of magical. It felt magical. Yeah, it was just unique. Yeah. It didn't completely sink in at first. Things started to change as she got older.

She just became aware of all these things that were different. Between me and my family. Okay, so I've got the picture out of me and my cousins. So in family photos, I kind of don't blend in. The obvious thing is my height. I'm 5-2, and all of my cousins are between 5-10 and 6-5. Wow. That's like a foot taller?

Right. So that was one thing. And then there were lots of other things, like she had blue eyes, whereas the rest of her family had. Mainly brown. And she had these drawing abilities. My mom, she can barely draw stick figures. She's a vegetarian. The only one in my family.

And so I was kind of wondering if that desire. to take care of anything living, maybe came from him. It just became more curious about how this man contributed to who I am. What did you know about him? The only information that I got is that he attended Baylor College of Medicine. Baylor is where? Texas. In 1981 when I was conceived.

But I don't know if he was a first year, second, third, or fourth year student. And that's it? Correct. That's not very much. Yeah. So when she was a teenager, she contacted the clinic. trying to request medical records, and I was told that they were destroyed years ago.

I felt like I had lost part of me. So can she solve this in any way? What is she going to do? Well, one night when she was in college, and this was a few years later, her mom just happened to be watching TV. Every year, 30,000 children are born in this country to mothers who have been artificially inseminated

with sperm from an anonymous donor. And she saw a special... About the gender sibling registry. database called the donor sibling registry.com. Oh, it's a website. It's a website. To try to help donors and donor offspring and half-siblings find each other. CBS News 60 Minutes.

So after my mother saw this show, I decided to register. So she logged on press clinic. And she put into the search engine Baylor College of Medicine. And? And there was actually a girl around my age. A young woman named Jessica. Which means they could be sisters. So she and I got in touch.

touch and started to talk. Right away, they noticed that they had a lot of things in common. We both had polycystic ovarian syndrome. Which is a genetic syndrome that you would inherit. And we were on the exact same medication and the same dosage. And that seemed like more than a coincidence. Just kind of sparked our curiosity. And so they decided that they would meet up.

She came and spent a weekend with me. By the time she left, we had come up with a list of 100 similarities. A hundred. On our list we have that we can't roll our tongues. We both born in 1982. We both have curly hair. We both had high cholesterol. We don't have any sense of direction.

Oh, I know what this is. This is what you do when you want something to be true. We both had butterfly tattoos. Absolutely. We had the same taste of music. When you, I think, want to believe. We were both very thoughtful. All these things that would otherwise, I think, maybe escape detection.

We thought that our handwriting was pretty similar. All of a sudden become really important. It just goes on and on. So they decide to have a DNA test. And? And the results come back. They called her, and then she called me. I mean, you can hear people's disappointment and sadness,

so I knew before she said anything. I think it was a 0.001% probability that we were sisters. Just like that, this possibility was gone. They began to feel loss and grief. Like, I look in the mirror, and I see a stranger looking at. back at me. Okay, so fast forward now a couple of years.

She goes to a library. A library in the medical center. She walks over to the stacks, pulls out... The old Baylor yearbooks. The old Baylor what? Earbooks. She figured as long as he showed up to get his picture taken on Picture Day,

he'd be in one of those books. Exactly. So... I took them off the shelf and I photocopied every page in those yearbooks. The 1979... 1980, 81, 82, 83, and 84 year books. And she took him home.

I was expecting just to flip through it and not see any similarities with any of the men and then get to one picture and think, OK, this is the man, but that's definitely not what happened. Instead, I realized that I looked like dozens, if not hundreds of the men. Let's see. And I would think that I had one man's nose and this guy. Another man's eyes. Here's another one.

Another man's chin. Even this guy. I mean, I think it's possible because the rounded eyebrows and bigger eyes, I just got overwhelmed. So she decided to enlist some help. Right. So I had my mom and three of my closest friends take sticky tabs and flip through the photos of all of the men.

He has blue eyes. They might say, well, you kind of look like this man or you kind of look like this other man. Our smiles are similar. And then they would mark the men who they thought resembled me the most. She then decided she would draft a letter. A letter. Dear doctor, it is after much thought that I am contacting you. I was thinking, well, I'll write the men who were consistently picked out.

I was conceived May 4, 1981, by an anonymous sperm donation through a Baylor College of Medicine student. I tried to think, okay, if I were a donor, what would my concerns be? I want to assure you that I am emotionally stable and financially secure. To provide additional reassurance to donors, I have been using a non-legally binding DNA test that cannot be used in And then I just explained, I think I tried to give an overview of who I am. I have large, almost navy blue eyes. I barely reach 5'2. Both my mother and I have A positive blood.

I am attaching my photographs to see if you recognize my face. And then I just said, thank you for your time, sincerely, Kathleen. And so she actually sends it out, the letter? Yeah. A round of 25 letters. To the men that looked most like her. Another round of 50. My biggest fear was that my letters would not be acknowledged.

I had been told for so long that my donor wouldn't want to know about me. He wouldn't care that I exist. I thought if I sent out 25 letters, maybe one would take the time to respond to me. Did she get anything back? She did. What'd they say? Well, I mean, some of them were what you might expect.

Wow, your letter was unexpected. Dear Kathleen, take me off your mailing list and do not ever contact me again. I remember just before my shift started, it was at 10.30 a.m. I rummaged through the mailbox and saw a letter that was addressed to myself, Dr. Daniel Zak. I live just outside Seattle, and I remember practice emergency medicine opening the letter. And the first sentence or two, I thought, uh-oh.

Oh, see, here's one that's handwritten. I was assured that it would be anonymous and that there would be no way for anyone to track me down, even if they wanted to. Though your motivations may be innocent, please consider the ramifications for others. by the knowledge you seek. I felt that I would never be contacted. But then there were others, like this guy. I think I called her right away. I'm Merriman Baker.

I'm an orthopedic surgeon who lives in the Houston area. And I said, well, I was a donor, I think 25 years ago. And I'd never thought, you know, this day would come. What does that mean? He, I wrote this one line down that he said, He said that's how really good things happen. You know, usually the way really good things happen. They come out of the blue.

I'm 51 now, and I don't have any kids. You know, not having kids would be the last thing I would have guessed, you know, 35 or 40 years ago from my own perspective. But I've always been very work-oriented. All of a sudden, you kind of look up and, you know, a few years have passed by, and you don't have any kids yet. So the prospect of having, you know, a daughter out there somewhere, that I didn't know about was quite frankly kind of a rush.

He called me and we just talked about our interests and our personality and we started finding similarities. Her mother had requested a blue-eyed donor, which I am. She has a positive blood, which would be compatible with mine. It gets even more eerie. The fact that we have most studied psychology. My major in college. And our cumulative grade point average was identical.

She certainly could be my daughter on many fronts. I spoke with my mother at length. She was extraordinarily excited at the prospect of having a grandchild. She prepared a place for her at Christmas dinner with her name on it. Wow. Do they get the DNA test? Not exactly. They just kept waiting.

Probably subconsciously. I almost didn't really want to know. Right. You know, let's just not even open up the results of the test. Let's just assume that it's a match. We get along so well, why does it matter? But at the same time, we both knew that we needed to know the truth. In the end, they finally went through with it.

I mean, it was kind of a running lottery about, you know, what do you think? And I was pretty impressed at the fact that it was probably going to be positive. The results come back from the lab. This is what a DNA test looks like. Yellow is basic information? It has this information about this and that in terms of the DNA. I have no idea with blue, green, gray, pink. And at the bottom, it's kind of yes or no.

The probability equals 0%. It was like 0% chance that it was positive. He wrote me and he said I'm heartbroken. I'm so sorry this was negative. And I think it took him about three or four weeks before he felt up to speaking to me again. Yes. You know, I mean, I've always thought I'd be a good dad. And, you know, I guess it was kind of like, it would have been kind of nice to have a child out there who's a well-adjusted, intelligent person.

You know, it's kind of all the things you'd want your kid to be. And that's what all of me made me stop my search. So did she stop then? She does exactly the opposite. I wrote every single male who went to Baylor from 79 to 84. which is how many males? 600. Wow.

Yeah. Out of those 600, 250 responded. Wow. Half of them right or back. Yeah. That's so weird. Exactly. That was exactly my reaction.

Weirder still? Not only did they respond, but they were very supportive. Dear Miss Labowny, you are clearly someone who thinks and feels deeply. That makes you special. One guy sent me a Christmas card. You sound and look like a remarkable young woman. This one says, I would claim you in a second. I'm trying to read his hand.

Writing, doctor's handwriting. Dear Kathleen, I've waited 26 years to receive a letter like this. And this is a man who's actually a friend of mine now. I've met him and I've met his wife. This one's really sweet too. Well, wait a bit. What about that guy at the beginning? The gun went, uh-oh.

Dr. Danzac? Yeah, him. Even he came around. As time has progressed since I initially read the letter, now I'm almost sorry that she's not my biologic daughter. That would have been kind of fun. And of all those, has anyone else agreed to do a paternity test? All told, she's had six.

16 DNA tests. Of they all turned out negative? Every test came back as negative. But I still feel like I probably have the answer in front of me. I just don't know which page is his. Just real quick. So I realize it's 12 now. The song, I don't know if you feel...

Yes. I was just thinking about that too. Go ahead and play some of it. Okay. I just need to get a... Whenever I've heard somewhere out there, ever since I was a kid, it would remind me.

me of my biological father and that he's out there. When I was a kid, sometimes I'd look up at the sky, and I would think that I literally know nothing about my father except that we were both looking at the exact same sky. Yeah, that's as far as I got. What do you mean? That's as far as you got. I never learned the ending. I'm still working on it. That story from Ari Daniel Shapiro and Lulu Miller, our producer. Time for a break.

Radio Lab will continue in a moment. This is Adrian Stein from New Brunswick, New Jersey. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.org. Hello, I'm Chad. I'm Boomrod. And I'm Robert Crillwood. This is Radio Lab.

Our topic today is sperm. A little wiggly cell that along with male pattern baldness seems to describe everything you need to know about being a man. Speaking of which, let's ask now one of the bigger questions that you can ask in a show about sperm, which is why are there sperm? Why are there sperm? Why are there men? This is a real question. A biological question which is completely baffling. That is Steve Jones. Hi, hello. I'm professor of genetics at University College London. He wrote a book called The Descent of Man, where he speculating.

about how we men got our start, and why we've managed to stick around so long. That's the real question. Here's this theory. Well, let's imagine ourselves in the primeval soup, okay? 3,000 million years ago. It was actually minstroni, because it was lumpy by then. And the lumps were cells. Hello.

And... To reproduce these cells. What they'd have to do is gather up their energy and all on their own. Split and half. Hello, hello. Make copies of themselves. Which are more or less identical, most of the time. The normal flow of events is these cells are copying and copying and copying.

Every so often, there would be a copying error. Hello. A mutation. These were happening all the time. Hello. Hello. Hello. Most were harmless.

But, let's imagine that one of these mutations caused the cell that received it to behave in a different way. this new cell How you doing? Through the randomness of nature It had acquired a talent Instead of dividing on its own It figured out that it could save some energy If it could swim up to another cell

Hello How you do it Burrow its way in And force that second cell to divide How you do in By so doing Not only was it avoiding a lot of work It was copying its own genes

At that moment, males were born. How do you do it? How you do it? How you do it? How you do it? That's what you're saying is that guys are essentially moochers. Well, that's how we got our start, according to this theory. Males began with selfishness. These little cells began to mooch off of other cells. Then they figured out, you know, over time, they could mooch better if they got smaller. They're small and faster.

And as mobile as they possibly can. Then they confuse with more and more of the other kind of cells and persuade them to divide. So now, if you want a definition that encompasses all males everywhere, from oak trees to elephants, to humans, to fish, there's only one real universal definition of what it means to be male. It's the sex that makes small sex cells and often lots of them. That's it. We make the small sex cells. That really is the mark of the male having a tiny sex cell. Meaning you, me, Steve, at the core of it, our maleness is defined by these.

little tiny swimming packets of genes, what we now call spurn. But you know what I don't understand. If all males are... Parasites? Yeah, yeah. Why would the female cells allow us to do that? Why don't they just say, go away? And that's a big question, because there are some species that have dispensed with males

altogether. Really? Yes, the one that comes to mind is a Californian lizard, which is quite common. It's called the Whip-Tale lizard, and they live in the Mojave Desert. And they're all-female. As far as we can see, there have been no males around for a long long time. It's kind of strange because they actually caught each other, and one female gets on top of the other and tries to mate with it.

So there's some kind of remnant of male behavior there, but they're all female. But how is it that they make little lizards? They just produce eggs which develop into lizards. Oh, they just don't bother with males. So the baby is identical to the mommy, so we're knocking about cloning here. Yeah. You know, plenty of birds can do that. I mean, chickens often lay eggs which develop and haven't been fertilized.

He says, there's some frogs that can do it too. But here's the thing. Even though making babies without men is, according to some scientists, the most efficient way to do it to reproduce, it's still pretty rare. There are very few land vertebrates, which are all females. Which brings us back to your question. Why? Why do females not make huge efforts to escape from them? That's what I want to know.

Why are we here? Why have males hung around this long? I mean, we shouldn't be doing this program. Somebody named Alice and someone named Laura should be here. Hi, I'm Alice A boomeraw. And I'm Laura Krellwidge. And this is radio. Hey, not so fast, ladies.

Wait. We're still here. Now, as for why, we're still here. There are tons of theories. Steve's best guess is that, you know what, we're not just parasites. We do offer the ladies one thing in return. Like what? Well, Lulu, going back to the soupy days at the beginning,

just imagine, says Steve, what if that soupy sea is changing? The water's getting warm. and the water is getting salty in, let's say. So let's say on one side of the pond, there's a cell that mutates and suddenly it can handle warm water. On the other side, there's a cell that mutates and suddenly it can handle salt. If this is an all-female world,

the warmies would copy themselves, the salties would copy themselves, and every new member of both of these tribes would... ...dive, because the water's both warm and salty. Because they couldn't combine their talents. But, if one of the, say, salty cells is a male... How you doing? Well, that male can swim up to a wormy cell, do his male invader thing?

And in the next generation, anti-warm and anti-salt can get together. So that's what males do. They bring female lines together and allow them to mix their genes. And that may be... That may be so important, says Steve, that the only time you can do without males is if your world is static. Wait, what about the lizards? Yeah, well, that's the interesting question. And I think the answer is, maybe, and we're kind of guessworth.

here. They live out in the desert. The desert doesn't change very much. That enemy is always the same, which is heat, shortage of food. Their enemy isn't something like disease or parasites, which are constantly evolving themselves. So they can afford to get one set of genes which are very effective, clone themselves by not having sex, whereas other creatures can't. Does that mean, you think that if our world were like that, that if we'd somehow perfected it, that we wouldn't need men? That's arguably true. And Oh God

There's somebody Buzz it on the doorbell now That's no stuff Hang on we've got another bloody Nuclear explosion Going on outside here Jesus Christ It normally quiet as the grave in here

Okay right True If we lived in an unchanging world Maybe we wouldn't need men But we don't live in a world That doesn't change Look at the AIDS virus Look at bird flu

They're out there They're waiting to get you, and they're going to get lots of us, soon and or later, with a new epidemic, which itself has changed genetically. And you're going to need the males to mix up the genes to make sure that the whole species doesn't disappear. So that, you know, I think we males are due for a brief moment of quiet self-congratulation. Robert, I've never told you this, but you're a really good guy. And you are spectacular. Thanks. Yeah.

The prospect of a world without men seemed remote until the invention of the deep freeze. because you can freeze burn and use it. I do like blue eyes. Look at that one, men's it. And it can be used after their death. Maybe I'm not ready yet. So that don't congratulate yourself that you're always going to have a world with men in it. You may just have a world with freezers in it.

Steve Jones wrote the book, Why the Descent of Men? Moving right along, the idea of like a world without men or a world where men have been replaced, by freezers? It's not men replaced by freezers, it's sperm frozen in freezer. Yeah, yeah, whatever. That's frozen men in freezer. Frozen little baby men. I want to tell you a story that's going to wipe that smile right off your face,

Krulwich. It comes from one of our favorite reporters, NPR's Nell Greenfield Boyce. Hello, Radio Lab. Hello. So should I just introduce this person? Yeah. Okay. My name is Lisha Nable Taylor. Okay. And I live in

Ashgash, Wisconsin. Basically, I love animals. Back in 1995, Lisha and her husband, John, were living in New York City. She lived in a mouse-infested, cheesy little dump in Park Slope. They were this young couple in their 30s. She was working at like a daycare center. I did basically creative movement. With little kids.

Under five. And he was a super in this big apartment building. On the upper east side. She and her husband both got some horrible flu. And I can remember laying in bed both of, and we, We flipped a quarter to see who would go make the can a chicken noodle soup. And I said, what would we do if we had kids right now? And I can remember laying there in that bed.

And John goes, we'd set that child up right there on the floor and throw some toys down there and we'd both lean over the edge. I had never been so sick. Did she have any idea what made them sick? Nope, just one of those things. And, you know, she got better. What about him? He didn't get better.

He was throwing up, cold, cough. Did you guys think it was just like the flu? Yeah, I mean, we just... But he was getting sicker and sicker, and at some point he was, like, having trouble kind of breathing. And so Alicia was just like, we're going to the emergency room. They wheeled him into the emergency room. First nurse we see, she says, oh, my God, John, why did you wait so long?

All of a sudden, he's, like, in the ICU. Well, it's funny, though, while John was in the hospital, I snapped three photographs of him. him. Who was going to say to him, see what you put me through. See what you look like, because I don't think he would have ever believed how many tubes and how many things were coming out of him. A couple days later, he had a cardiac arrest. And after that, he's brain dead. And I went home that night, you know, I'm right across the street. I went home and I saw our whole lives go right out the door. It was as I looked out over that east,

River. I saw the kids we weren't going to have. That fear of, oh my God, I'm going to lose everything. And then she remembered something, something that had happened about six months before. John and I had seen something on the news. Hours after Anthony Baez died in a confrontation with police, his widow told her sister-in-law, I want his baby. This one day, before she went to work, she had seen this report about a man who had died, a young man who had died. and when he was lying there in the morgue, family members of his wife actually said to the doctors, is there any way that you can save his sperm?

The family called in a New York hospital urologist, Peter Schlegel, who had... I'm Peter Schlegel, and I'm urologist in chief at New York Presbyterian Hospital. Who had removed sperm from many men before, but never a dead one. Had you been to the morgue before? No. It's probably not quite as clean as on TV, and certainly working with a dead body is different. Schlegel says Mrs. Baez would have an excellent chance of conceiving with the sperm he retrieved

if that's what she decides to do. Warren Levinson, New York. And I said to John, I go, wow, is that wild or what? What do you think of that? She said that John was like in the bathroom. You know, I mean, he was brushing his teeth. You know, in his usual rush to get off to work. And she said to him, like, if you died, would you be okay with me doing that? He says, well, if it's really tragic, he goes, go for it. Then later on, she went to work. Remember, she works at like this daycare kind of center. And she mentioned it to somebody at work. And one of the women who works there pointed to a kid and said, you see that kid, his father is the doctor who removed the sperm. Wow.

No kidding. And so she's remembering all of this six months later. I went, oh, that little boy's dad. You know, her husband is brain dead at this point. And what she decides to do is go to work and find the name of that kid. whose father had taken the sperm. So you pick up the phone and... Got an appointment with him right away.

That Wednesday, I went and saw Peter Schlegel. On that Thursday, John... He died around 6 o'clock. I'm really sorry. We were best friends. A team came in to his room. She waited outside. What do you actually need to do a procedure like this?

Basically a vasectomy kit. They take a needle. put it into the man's body. One of the richest sources of sperm would be the vast, the tube that normally carry sperm from the area around the testicles to the ejaculatory regions. They literally put the needle into that tube

and suck the sperm out. So you're left with a little one-inch-tall conical tube that has tens of millions or maybe even hundreds of millions of sperm within it. You know, I can't help but ask myself the question. Maybe I'll just ask you, Would you do this? Absolutely.

Really? No question in my mind. I've been married eight years. I don't have children. I want to have children with my husband. And if he died, I would absolutely do it. And no ethicist that a hospital is going to be able to tell me no, because I got my husband to put it in his will.

Why? So that there would be no question if he died, that I would have permission to do this. But why are you so certain? There's not a party that's a little hesitant about it? What would it really means? What would it really mean? I don't know, that you're somehow,

I mean, at the very least, it's a kid without a dad. And also, like, the kid would have your husband's eyes and his nose and his ears. And so it would be kind of like an echo of him, a reminder. There is nothing that I would want more. Honestly, I mean, you know, if my husband died, there was nothing I would want more than a child of his. But, you know, Peter Schlegel, what Peter Schlegel told me is that... In most cases, women do not use the sperm. Women will not go forward and use those sperm.

Really? They collect it, time passes, maybe they meet someone else. And decide to move on with their life. That's interesting. And what about Lisa? Did she move on? Well, no. If I was standing at 70 and looking back at my life,

then I'd have to kick myself if I didn't do this. It would have been out of fear that I didn't. Because everybody kind of looks at it like, God, that's weird. That's, what are you going to tell this kid? Oh, you came from somebody dead? How would you explain this to your child? And simply, well, with the truth, I loved your father. He died.

I saved his sperm post-mortem so that I could bring you into the world. You are indeed a part of him and you are indeed a part of me. After John died, she moved back to Wisconsin and she waited for a while. Her life was moving on. She had relationships with other people. but she didn't let go of the idea. Finally, six years after her husband died, she decided that she was going to do it.

I think it really came down to me making a decision about doing it on my own. She called and she made an appointment at a fertility clinic back in New York. I'd gone out in September, like the day before the planes flew into the World Trade Center and the city felt solemn. For Alicia, it seemed like signs,

were everywhere, signs of fate. I guess there was just such a big part in the coincidences. Like what? Well, it was pretty amazing in that the In Vitro Center was in the building where John and I made love. I mean, it was in that building. You know, the doctor's office where she was getting the fertility treatments were in her old building.

It was such a coincidence that she'd even seen that news report. And the fact that it was the doctor's little boy I was teaching. That her cat died while she was in New York. and she sort of had this idea that... With this death, this life comes. Things were dying, but there was going to be new life. I had all these eggs, so the chances of it working were really big. I was for sure going to get pregnant.

You know, all of these things just came together, so it felt natural and right. A fertility clinic technician thought this frozen six-year-old sperm injected it into the eggs, and then they waited. I mean, had you, like, gotten nursery stuff? ready and stuff? Like were you at that point level of certainty? I'd gone out and chopped and yeah. I had it all picked out. But none of the eggs fertilized.

None. None. It was like another death. I mean it was just, it was like another death. She had told me that she had John cremated and that she had sort of half of his ashes still in her house. house and that she didn't know really what she was going to do with them, that she knew at some point she had to scatter them or something, but she hadn't really worked out a plan. And, you know, I pointed out that, well, she's got the sperm store too. Like, do you think that that's something that you want to somehow do something with, or will it be there forever?

Until there's a power outage, no, I'm just so cynical. It doesn't amount to anything. It's It's the thing that's there that isn't It's like the chair It's not who he is Or was Now Greenfield voice Thanks to her

Thank you to NPR To NPR Science Desk Anything you heard today You can hear again on our website RadioLab.org Our email address is RadioLab At WNYC.org I'm Jan Abumrod

I'm Robert Crilwich Thanks for listening Radio Lab is produced by Lulu Miller and Jada Bumrad. Our staff includes Serene Wheeler, Jonathan Mitchell, Ellen Horn, Amanda Aronchic, Jessica Benko and Elizabeth Giddens. With help from Anna Boyko Weiro, Ike Sri Skandarajia, and C. Chang-Lin, and the original music from Jonathan Mitchell. Special thanks to Whitney Thompson and her students at Brooklyn Friends. Bye-bye.