Ambergris is found in the innards of the sperm whale and used in perfumes after it has been vomited up.
In the fullness of time, perhaps men will think likewise and have some of the sperm of their carefree, mutation-free youths frozen in case they fancy a little procreation in their old age.
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It has been known for years that in a range of animals from insects to birds the males increase the quality and quantity of the sperm they ejaculate when those sperm are likely to find themselves in competition with sperm from another male.
The idea of selling any body part, let alone the combination of sperm and egg that leads to the formation of an embryo, can be disconcerting at first (or even second) thought.
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Like three legs of a relay race, Goldberg passes along the baton of fertility (aka: the vials of sperm) to Jones, who meets a man, falls in love, gets pregnant.
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The biological reasons for why this may be are unclear, but the researchers speculated that potential chromosomal abnormalities in the eggs of older women and mutations in the sperm of older men may be a factor.
If you were to survey a random group of men about their greatest health concerns, I doubt the length of their sperm cells would even make the list.
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Using eggs from the same donor so that the offspring would be kin, doctors fertilized them with the respective sperm of the two men and implanted the embryos in two separate surrogates.
Cryos of Denmark, the largest sperm bank in Europe with a catalogue of more than 400 donors, is one of the most popular among French lesbians.
Reproductive cloning, which created Dolly the sheep in 1997, involves transferring the nucleus of an adult cell into an egg, giving the resulting embryo a full set of genes without the normal sperm-meets-egg fertilisation step.
In fact, the shortage of sperm and egg donors (in 2010, the last year for which data in the United States were available, fewer than 1000 embryo donations were recorded) has prompted robust discussions around the world about the potential benefits and challenges of a for-profit model.
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During the production of eggs and sperm, chromosomes pair up, cross over and swap segments of DNA, mixing the genes you inherited from your mother and father (see diagram).
The ZSL work is being undertaken in the Sea of Cortez (also known as the Gulf of California), where sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) gather in large numbers.
While doctors at the center say they can't verify the sperm is actually from their husbands in prison, they require close relatives from both the wife and husband's side of the family to sign papers saying the sperm belongs to the husband in prison.
And the more inconsistently sized the sperm a man manufacturers, particularly with regard to the flagellum, the lower his concentration of sperm that could swim well.
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The body that regulates IVF clinics in the UK, the Human Fertilisation Embryo Authority (HFEA), concedes that provision is "patchy" in parts of the country but says both sperm and egg donation was falling long before the change in the law.
The sighting of sperm whales off Scotland's north-west coast in winter has been described as "extraordinary" by research charity Sea Watch.
The navy has also noted the location of a sperm whale off Mull which was seen in Oban bay earlier this month.
The theory is that the protein in sperm which triggers chemical changes in the egg, leading to embryo development, is defective or missing from the sperm of some infertile men.
South Korea's researchers have taken egg cells from volunteer women, removed the nuclei from those cells (which contain only half of the genetic complement required to make a human being, since the other half is provided by the sperm), and replaced each nucleus with one taken from one of the volunteer's body cells (which contains a full genetic complement).
The substance, which is found in the digestive system of sperm whales, is valuable and used in perfume.
In some cases, the customer knows who has donated the sperm, although rules determining the identity of the donor vary from country to country.
They identified two genes - zipper and lgl - which they found worked together to change the make up of sperm cells, making it impossible for them to fertilise uninfected eggs.
But the true extent of the problem is largely unknown because there are no official figures on waiting lists for sperm and egg donation around the country or data on the number of British patients travelling abroad for treatment.
In fact, the indications are that the more mature red sea urchins are the most prolific producers of sperm and eggs, and are perfectly capable of breeding even when incredibly old.
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Through efforts by his lab and others, he discovered that one of the most abundant proteins in mammalian sperm, hexokinase, is also the first enzyme in the glycolysis assembly line on its tail.
But from skinny jeans to meggings, the only thing we know for sure (but not really) is that the world's collective sperm count is slowly being compromised in the name of men's fashion.
In mammals, this kind of epigenetic modification has been assumed to last only during the life span of a particular animal, because such changes are usually erased in the sperm and egg cells.
With the massive whales come other giants of the sea, like whale sharks and sperm whales and occasionally hammerheads, sea lions and dolphins.
And, since eggs are more costly to make than sperm, the number of her descendants is limited by the number of eggs she can grow, while a male's posterity depends more on the number of females he can mate with.
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