Stop the press!  There appears to be a reported shortage of donated sperm in the UK at the moment.  Yes, men can donate their sperm to sperm banks and become a sperm donor for artificial insemination if they’d like.  How do you feel about that? What if you became the biological father of someone you never meet, would you be ok with that?  Well, lots of men are, because sperm banks never really seem to have a shortage of donations of sperm/semen.  Except for now, the United Kingdom appears to have a shortage of the precious half of life making cellular structures.

The British Fertility society has reported that there is actually a shortage in willing men to give their donations of sperm lately, for reasons not totally known.  Well, actually a big potential problem, and something that may need to be repealed if they are going to have any success in the future collecting sperm samples from donors, is that Britain has passed a law that does not allow totally anonymous sperm donations.  This means a man’s privacy is not completely protected if he chooses to donate his sperm. 

That fact could definitely be offputting for thousands of men who want to give their sperm.  Men who wish to not be identified as a sperm donor by children who were fathered by their sperm sample through insemination cannot any longer be guaranteed that they will never be contacted because the knowledge is available to the kids when they become eighteen years old.

To put perspective on the sperm donor shortage, the number of women needing artificial insemination to get pregnant in the UK per year is in the thousands, and the number of male sperm donors is only in the low hundreds.  I’d say that’s a pretty bad ratio, wouldn’t you.  Maybe they’d take US men if they get desperate.  Heck, maybe they’ll start offering some cash for it! 

There may be new technology for IVF (In Vitro Fertilization, where a woman can be artificially inseminated to get pregnant when there are difficulties for whatever reason in achieving pregnancy)  that may reduce the odds of a woman being impregnated with multiple embryos, as is often the case now in a lot of IVF endeavors, with women having mutliple babies from it.   In fact, most women understand this fact and have to be ok with it to be able to go through the process. 

IVF is sort of a “test tube baby” sort of process.  What happens is that eggs are taken from a woman, and the sperm is taken from the man, and  those are cultivated in a petrie dish (or however else they do this, there may be some other mechanism used for all I know).  Currently, the doctor takes the most viable of the bunch and implants them into a woman’s uterus, and the hope is that one of some of them take off and start to develop into little bundles of joy. 

The newer process, and researchers are hoping a soon to be very viable and cost effective process, is that the doctors would take the most viable cells via DNA tests to determine which are the strongest and most able to develop into these blastocysts, which are the precursor to a full blown fetus, and therefore cut down on the need to cultivate multiples of babies since this is essentially what leads to multiple births - the needs to implant multiples for maximum likelihood that one or some will take and the women will be pregnant. 

Newer DNA testing and application techniques are going to make for some very exciting advances in modern day science. Already, there are several DNA tests on the horizon or at least in research and development, that may help determine serious illness before it occurs by determining likelihood of development via DNA structure and background. 

These genetic weaknesses may be able to be exploited to help find cures and tests to prevent degenerative diseases such as cancers and other things that can be prevented if caught early or put into preventive mode before they are even a problem. 

Well, there’s even more news of the weird on the horizon, and this time it’s about a grandpa, or grandpa to be, who is donating his sperm for what is to be his own grandchild.  Yep, that’s right, this guy’s donating his swimmers to his offspring and partner so that they may use his sperm to create a child, and it would be his grandchild. 

Like you probably are, I was wondering how ethical or socially acceptable this was, but apparently the couple and the grandfather mulled this over with ethics committees and standards committees and all that good stuff before getting the go ahead to do this, which will probably be a landmark occurrence, as there are no other grandfathers who’ve knowingly donated their sperm for artificial insemination of their son or daughters offspring. 

This reminds me of a another story in this same vein that came up a couple weeks back, where a grandmother gave birth to her own grandchildren.  Talk about motherly love, this woman was not only old enough to be a grandmother, but also carried her own grandchildren in her womb for nine months all for the love of her son or daughter (not sure which it was now, I read it a while ago). 

We’re also hearing a lot about women having children at much later ages than what used to be considered non-risky, and they seem to be doing it with fairly minimal complications, as compared to years ago when getting pregnant after a certain age (40 I believe) was basically almost advised against as potentially health complicating and even life threatening for certain women.  Guess we’ve come a long way as a species, eh? 

There may be, in the near future, a home test that can test male semen to determine whether the man is fertile or not and can fertilize the female egg to produce offspring.  Fertility problems are either on the rise or more recognized nowadays, whether it is because we have the internet media and everyone is more aware that it is a problem or not, we do hear about fertility a lot more these days.  Usually we hear about it when it is a woman who is having fertility problems, but we know that men can have the same problems. 

A man can be sterile or simply not produce enough sperm in his semen to impregnate a woman.  Sure, college guys who are nowhere near settling down and want to have sexual intercourse with no worries about making babies may think this sounds “awesome”, but when they are older they and their partners may desire to have children of their own, and male fertility issues can prevent them from reproducing. 

The home test would be able to detect a protein in a man’s semen and determine from this whether the man is fertile or not.  Pretty high tech idea, and it may take a while to get to market.  I have a question though, why not just let doctors administer this test, or is this like the male equivalent of the female pregnancy test?  Might this tell men that they need to start consuming the best multivitamins for men that they can in hopes of strenghtening their sperm into better, stronger swimmer?  I keed, I keed of course. 

A protein chemical called MIF for short is the chemical in a man’s body that would show up in his semen.  This chemical is supposed to be responsible for making a man’s sperm strong swimmers, so to speak, so that they can make it all the way up to the female’s egg and live long enough to burrow through the egg, fertilizing it and resulting eventually in a fetus that develops into a baby.

The problem with men who are infertile is that they either do not have this chemical at all or do not have enough of it, and their sperm are rendered weaker and unable to make the swim far enough to fertilize the woman’s egg.  They end up dying before they reach their destination, basically!  This test could help doctors and couples determine what their next steps should be, and also detects who in the partnership is the one that is unable to conceive so that they can be the one that gets the necessary treatment and increases their odds of conceiving naturally. 

After a failed attempt at getting rare pandas in captivity to mate and produce offspring using Viagra, zoo and wildlife officials have turned to the help of “panda porn”.  That’s right, apparently pandas may be turned on by watching themselves (or who knows, maybe humans) having sex, and be prompted to mate with one another, producing healthy viable offspring, something that is rare and hard to keep alive in the wild. 

I didn’t know Viagra could be used on other species, but like any other unnatural and natural male sexual enhancement drugs, I suppose it would work the same on a panda, sending an increased circulation of bloodflow to the penis, and enhancing the erection, making for a better shot (no pun intended) at impregnating the female panda successfully, since Viagra is also known to sometimes increase the amount of semen that comes out of the male penis.

This would increase the female panda’s likelihood of getting pregnant, because the more sperm that the male produces and ejaculates, the more chance she has of getting one of her eggs fertilized. 

No word yet on whether the pandas have successfully mated at the point I’m writing this, but who knows, by the time this hits the web, we may be one panda ahead of the game in the race to prevent them from extinction if wildlife experts have their way!  Who would have thought that Viagra, one of the biggest male sexual enhancement drugs in history, would be possibly responsible for the savior of an endangered species?

Wow.  It’s truly a miracle of modern science.  Male sperm cells have been duplicated from completely different male cells, and this may even be treading on the morally ethical or not ethical line in terms of procreation, but I’m on the VERY LIBERAL side of the fence on this issue, trust me. 

In the ongoing research that is currently happening in the area of stem cell technology ( a very politically touchy subject at the moment ), apparently now sperm cells can be recreated, or synthetically generated from the cells found in bone marrow!  Now, this is truly significant, and also goes to show that we’re not in the age of innocence any more, scientifically, socially, and politically speaking.

But not so fast…researchers are saying that this is really just the beginning, and these bone marrow-derived cells are really just starting to show the signs that they are developing into immature sperm cells, and the genesis into mature sperm cells that are capable of reproducing may be as much as five years off, which is really only like minutes scientifically speaking. 

Heck, we all know how fast five years flies by in our lives.  Sad, actually how fast time goes, especially scientifically speaking.  One has to wonder though, are we meant to scientifically advance this far, genetically speaking? 

Or is this my skeptic speaking out loud?  Am I getting too existential on you?  I really do just wonder, should we really be “perverting” science to this degree, or is this truly a miracle that could help millions of people in ways we can’t even imagine?  Just an open discussion….feel free to add your comments on this controversial, thought provoking subject.  

Apparently there are women who are actually allergic to semen, that stuff that contains men’s sperm which comes out when a man ejaculates (in case you missed sexual health 101 in high school:) 

Semen allergy is basically just like any other allergy, in that it irritates the place that it touches, the woman’s vagina, and it can be so severe in some women with this precarious allergy that it can actually induce anaphylactic shock. 

Women who are THIS allergic to men’s semen are actually urged to carry around an epipen, which is a self injected shot of epinephrine, more notoriously carried around by those with severe bee sting allergies in case they are stung. 

This means that women with severe allergies to semen can actually die if they are exposed to semen and are not treated within adequate time to reverse the allergic reaction to it.  It is a fairly rare condition, but actually many women have a very light case of semen sensitivity. 

The process by which medical professionals can help women with semen allergy is to do sort of a desensitization treatment where women are exposed to varying amounts of semen to desensitize their bodies to the presence of the foreign substance in their body and therefore overcome the body’s natural allergic reaction to the stuff. 

Doctors also prescribe frequent sex to women with semen allergies, so that they may further their contact with the substance and help to desensitize themselves further on an ongoing basis, and hopefully cure themselves of this unfortunate allergy once and for all.  Semen volume enhancers for men with partners with this allergy would probably not be recommended, fellas! 

The latest news in men’s fertility and one of the crucial factors that can make or break a man’s sperm quality and baby making abilities is that his weight, or more specifically obesity or being overweight, can actually affect his fertility. 

The study that was done to confirm these findings were done on couples that were both skinnier and overweight, and it was done to confirm whether weight really does impact a man’s ability to produce a child with a woman.  It was guestimated by the outcome of the studies that for every 20 excess pounds a man carries on his frame, his fertility may be cut by up to 10%, which is really pretty significant if a couple if trying to have a child.

To be equal in the study, the researchers made sure that the female half of the couple participants were not over 40, since a woman’s age can greatly affect the ability to have children, which would have skewed the results and shown a false report of why the couple was having trouble conceiving. 

The fertility capabilities of the men went down when their BMI went up.  The BMI is the Body Mass Index, and it is a standard measurement of a person’s weight as it relates to their height.  It basically shows what end of the spectrum a man is on the weight scale - heavy, middle of the road, healthy or underweight. 

The exact reasons for the weight and fertility relationship in men could not yet be pinpointed, but common theory might be that the relationship of the overweight BMI could cause a decline in the sperm ratio due to more body fat. 

Or, it might be a simple explanation that overweight men are less physically fit, and therefore suffer a lower libido and have less sex, leading to decreased fertility.  Other reasons are under review.  I always wonder how effective these studies are.  Aren’t they really just a bunch of assumptions, based on common sense?

Some men wonder why, when they have marathon sex like 10-12 times in one weekend (I don’t know how they do it, do you?), they many times lose sensation in their penis as they go, and often times can not even reach sexual climax or cumming, let alone experience an orgasm.

It’s true, and closer to fruition than when I originally reported on the newest discovery in contraception, or the prevention of pregnancy by “disabling” the reproductive system of a man of woman in some way. 

Several different formulas for male contraception may soon be available, and by several forms I mean the same types of forms that are available to women today too, most notably the oral contraceptive pill, and other less popular forms like injections, patches and implants. 

The science behind them is the constant release of testosterone over a three month period, which drop a man’s sperm count (ideally) down to zero, so he’s basically shooting blanks when he ejaculates during sex, so he cannot impregnate his partner.

Men in clinical trials who are taking various formulas of the testosterone infused male birth control are reporting few side effects, mostly a mild weight gain and possibly some others that were not immediately apparent or severe enough to note. 

This should be interesting, because typically the burden of birth  control has fallen on the woman’s shoulders, and the shift in responsibility may be a tough one for some men to take.  Anyone who wants to comment on their personal outlook on male birth control, I’d appreciate the discussion.