Sperm has been on my mind this week. (Note to self: edit this line before filing copy.) I was reading reports about a looming spermageddon.
And I was watching Outlander, which is basically soft porn and some time travel. A recent episode had Claire (a doctor from the future who’s landed in 1740s Scotland) showing her husband Jamie his own sperm through a microscope.
Jamie: “Ah, I see ’em. Wee things with tails swimming about.”
Claire: “Aren’t they marvellous?”.
Jamie: “Aye. Busy wee strivers pushing and writhing. So many of them. Ha.”
He mistook them for the new-fangled “germs”, but they were actually sperms. “I woke up in custody of them this morning,” Claire says (flashback to aforementioned Scottish soft porn).
Back to spermageddon.
Much was made this week of a column in Guardian Australia by Erin Brockovich (yes, that Erin Brockovich) on the possibility of human extinction by 2045 — and it has sparked conversations about shrinking penises, The Taint, and those dwindling sperm counts.
Brockovich’s column was based on a new book by environmental and reproductive epidemiologist Shanna Swan, Count Down.
Publishers describe it as “an urgent, meticulously researched and ground-breaking book about the ways in which chemicals in the modern environment are changing — and endangering — human sexuality and fertility on the grandest scale”.
In short, chemicals including phthalates and bisphenols that are used in everyday products are driving down sperm counts.
“Following the trajectory we are on, Swan’s research suggests sperm counts could reach zero by 2045,” Brokovich wrote. “Zero. Let that sink in. That would mean no babies. No reproduction. No more humans.”
One of Australia’s top reproductive experts, Professor Sarah Robertson — director of the University of Adelaide’s Robinson Research Institute — looked at the data on declining sperm counts and tweeted that it was “pretty compelling” but that a graph showing a steep decline that would probably hit zero in about 2045 had “lots of questionable assumptions and [the] likelihood of straight line decline is low”.
University of Melbourne reproductive biology Associate Professor Mark Green says the 2045 prediction was “a little far-fetched”.
Then there’s this explanation from Swan. Asked whether her words about sperm counts going to zero by 2045 were accurate, she said: “Yes and no.” If the decline was steady, the median sperm count would be zero. Half of men would have no sperm, the other half would have quite low sperm counts.
“However, that’s an extrapolation quite a way from the data, which is risky,” she said.
“It’s particularly risky for biological systems because when you approach a lower limit, the curve will have to flatten out. I don’t actually believe we’re going to hit zero, but if we did, it would be very dire.”
That “prediction” was heavily qualified, and Brokovich indeed just said it “could” happen.
So in this week’s edition of I Call Bullshit, there’s no real bullshit to call out. And the distinction between no sperm at all and a median sperm count of zero got lost in translation.
Still, a headline about the end of sperm hauled a lot of attention on to a really important topic — and I got to gratuitously reference Outlander in the hope that it’ll do the same here.
How is it possible to have ‘a median sperm count of zero?’ To have a median of zero, half would be positive and half negative.
Perhaps it’s the mode that’s meant? The most frequently occurring number.
Maybe half of them are swimming in the wrong direction.
How appropriate that we read on the same weekend about the scientific discovery that models of embryos could be made from bits of old skin.
With development of this process, and extension of the time for which already extant artificial wombs are effective, we may be soon to reach Huxley’s predictions as seen in “Brave New World”.
Those of religious bent may even “reinterpret” their books to have their gods “in the beginning” creating lumps of skin and a small lab where the first man and woman could grown. Perhaps they would even follow the lead of Huxley and reassign the position of principal god to Henry Ford.
Perhaps a few of the more liberal and rational churches will even recognise that sexual activity has as a recreational, as well as procreational, purpose although that may be unknown to those whose exposure has always been through the rape of children.
Sperm counts do not need to reach zero to doom us to extinction. Although only one gets to make the big score, many thousands of your boys are needed to acheive fertilisation. Each individual sperm contributes a small amount of enzyme to help breach the egg. One on his own is simply not enough. I’ll see your Outlander reference and raise you a Monty Python one. It seems that indeed, every sperm is sacred.
I think the key point missed is not just the declining number but the declining viability and increasing genetic issues due to DNA damage from “the usual suspects”. That we are weakening our gene pool I have no doubt but try to raise that issue at your peril…
Yes, but how much is due to sperm count and how much due to late-20th-century predatory capitalism?
If all mothers resorted to IVF, the world would have little use for them choosing male babies. As Dr Strangelove would have pointed out, the few remaining males would become immensely popular.
As my wife once pointed out in a similar discussion someone is needed to take the bins out each week. This may be the key to male survival.
These are poor numbers from data no collected to be representative, but collected for other purposes. Both sets are affected by self selection. One set is men at fertility clinics. Increasing age of people going to fertility clinics is an obvious probable confounding factor. The other set is sperm donors, who are a very small subset of men, and may have changed characteristics or behaviours over the last 50 years, especially with laws removing secrecy about sperm donor parents.
The “conclusions” about hormone mimicking chemicals were the intended conclusion from the start – not concluded from this evidence.
So this data seems about are reliable as the science in Outlander.
It also seems this article was a day early. It appeared before the story on “data collection” on this very subject within the hallowed halls of Parliament itself. This comments section would have been much more fun today.