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Men, who needs them? But what a colourless world it would be
IS the so-called crisis of masculinity about to come to a head, leaving males gibbering in heaps on psychiatrists' couches, asking why they continue to exist in a world where the day is fast approaching when they will no longer be needed, even biologically?
Each new development in reproductive medicine is predicted by some to be yet another "Frankenstein" step away from the natural. Some people make a living from scaremongering about science, but I like to think it would take more than a few headlines about laboratory-produced sperm to prick the averagely healthy male ego and induce a full-blown reassessment of his purpose on the planet.
Scientists at Newcastle University say they've created human sperm for the first time from embryonic stem cells by using a Vitamin A derivative called retinoic acid. The breakthrough came when 20 per cent of the cells treated began to form early-stage sperm and a number of them continued to grow, divide, develop tails and move.
These cells have been described as "fully mature, functional" sperm, and researchers believe they will help them to understand how sperm actually form and develop, which could contribute to a greater understanding of the causes of male infertility. This could, in turn, help to develop new treatments for the condition, meaning no man in future would truly be infertile.
Other scientists, including Dr Allen Pacey at Sheffield University, say they're not yet convinced that the Newcastle University team have truly produced normal human sperm. The Newcastle researchers acknowledge that it's early days, but important scientific progress has been made. We're quite a distance from the point of new human beings being cooked up in a Petri dish then incubated for nine months in a glorified greenhouse to "grow" a child.
The advance, if confirmed, raises all sorts of ethical and legal questions over the safety of the procedure and the future role of men in procreation. In theory, the finding could lead to a single male embryo providing a line of stem cells which might yield an unlimited supply of sperm.
But, as the Newcastle team leader Professor Karim Nayernia says, yes, if the findings become fully realised and lead to new therapies, then it would be possible to dispense with men in reproduction – but only if we wanted to reproduce a population all the same size and shape due to all having the same genetic origin. Even if the original stem cells came from George Clooney or some Nobel Prize laureate, I doubt anyone would see the sense in that.
Potential treatments developed from these early findings to help infertile couples are estimated to be up to 10 years away, and in the meantime, changes to legislation will be needed to allow laboratory-produced sperm to be used in assisted-fertility treatment.
Headlines that refer to "a world without men" are therefore rather precipitate. For a start, men will always be needed because the Y chromosome stem-cells needed to start the scientific process in any such sperm "production-line" can only come from a male embryo. And for another, such knee-jerk and hysterical slogans ignore the fact that those women who want to have a child with minimal involvement from men can already do so, one way or another.
The headlines also categorise human reproduction as a process that is purely biological, ignoring the emotional, psychological and social aspects of the urge to reproduce and the human relationships that usually lead to it.
But then, raising the spectre of "a world without men" does allow a welcome field day to all those who like to question what we women need men for now that we out-perform them at school and university, earn equal pay (allegedly), take out our own mortgages and run the home while managing to read a novel a week and cooking the perfect souffl. It is fun sometimes to have a laugh about who would deal with the cats/change the lightbulbs/mow the lawn/do the decorating/deal with car crises and who would tell us we look pretty (even if we don't) or make us feel soft and vulnerable when we pretend to be frightened of a spider in the bath, if our menfolk were not around.
But seriously, life would be considerably less colourful and amusing if I didn't have a partner with completely different wiring, who takes joy in checking the supermarket bill using an abacus (just because it's strange, ancient and beautiful), who knows the entire history of Ipswich Town Football Club, who cannot be surpassed at frisbee, who relishes telling the story of the Battle of the Little Bighorn and who is a wonderful, warm, tender, patient, loving example of how to be a man, partner, father and all-round golden human being.
In the future, it may be increasingly possible (almost) to ignore male input reproductively, but even so, I don't think many women would want to buy into that kind of world.
So I vote to keep them in the balloon...
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Thursday 09 February 2012
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