Men should consider a new form of birth control in which they bank their sperm when they are young and then have a vasectomy, says Carl Djerrasi, the Californian chemist who made the first oral contraceptive. When they want to have children, they simply draw on their account and achieve conception through artificial insemination.
Djerrasi's proposal was inspired by a chance meeting with Stanley Leibo, a cryobiologist at Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph. 'At least 50 million head of cattle a year are inseminated with frozen bull sperm,' says Leibo. He and his colleagues recently thawed out the 37-year-old semen from a bull and found the sperm still swimming vigorously.
Djerassi and Leibo acknowledge that men would have to be convinced that long-term storage of human sperm is reliable. So they propose that the military should begin a massive sperm banking programme - without the vasectomies at first - in ...
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