News Release

You Don't Need To Make Sperm Or Even Be Alive To Be A Father

Reports and Proceedings

New Scientist

The wild frontier of reproductive technology has just got wilder. Last week, for the first time, sperm taken from a dead man resulted in a human birth. Meanwhile, an Italian IVF specialist claims to have produced four babies using sperm grown in the testes of rodents.

Gaby Vernoff, whose husband Bruce died from a reaction to a prescription medicine in 1995, gave birth last week to a baby girl in a Los Angeles hospital.

About 30 hours after Bruce Vernoff's death, Cappy Rothman of Century City Hospital in Los Angeles extracted sperm from the body at the family's request. Rothman has supervised this procedure more than a dozen times. "Retrieving something from their loved one gives families in grief some hope," he says. The Vernoffs were the first to use the sperm for fertilisation, however. Single thawed sperm were injected into Gaby Vernoff's eggs. After one unsuccessful attempt, she become pregnant last year (This Week, 18 July 1998, p 5).

British law requires written consent from a man for his sperm to be used after his death. But there is no such requirement in the US, leading to concerns that sperm could be "stolen" from a man who had no intention of reproducing.

This has inspired a bill placed before the New York state legislature by Roy Goodman, a Republican state senator. It requires prior written consent for a man's sperm to be retrieved after death. The request must come from a wife or partner. But the bill has languished in committee for more than a year. "Nothing has focused people's attention on the issue," says Kathy Lenhart, Goodman's executive assistant. The Vernoff birth may provide that focus.

Gaby Vernoff did not have her husband's written consent to take his sperm after his death. However, Rothman says she does have a video in which her husband expressed his desire to have children.

While the arguments about posthumous reproduction centre on consent, concerns about safety have been raised by the latest announcement from Severino Antinori of the International Associated Research Institute for Human Reproduction in Rome.

Antinori attracted controversy previously when he used IVF to allow a 62-year-old woman to become a mother. Now he claims to have turned sterile men into fathers by maturing their sperm inside the testes of rodents. At a conference in Venice last week, he claimed the technique had already resulted in four babies-the oldest of which is now eight months old.

Antinori reportedly collaborated with Nikolaos Sofikitis of Tottori University in Yonago, Japan, who last month announced that he had grown human sperm in mice and rats (This Week, 13 February, p 4).

Antinori could not be reached for comment, and many biologists are sceptical of his claims. But if they are true, he risks the opprobrium of reproductive specialists who argue that animal tests to show sperm develop normally if grown in another species should have been completed first. "You still need to do the safety checks," says Mark Johnson of Imperial College, London.

###

Authors: Philip Cohen and Michael Day
New Scientist magazine, issue 27th March

PLEASE MENTION NEW SCIENTIST IF YOU USE THIS ARTICLE - THANKS



Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.