[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hello.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Hello.

JAD: Hello.

ROBERT: Hello.

JAD: Today I want to start the show by telling you about a guy—well, a very, very, very important man. Probably one of the most important guys in ...

ROBERT: Guydom.

JAD: Yeah. Okay, tell me the correct pronunciation on, uh, Leokenhoken?

MATTHEW COBB: The way that you should say it is something like leven-herk.

JAD: And here, thankfully, to help with our pronunciation and to fill in the details is professor Matthew Cobb.

MATTHEW COBB: I'm the program director for zoology at the University of Manchester, and I've written a book about this called Generation: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unraveled the Secrets of Sex, Life, and Growth.

JAD: Okay, so, Leeuwenhoek.

MATTHEW COBB: Yeah, that's fine.

JAD: Okay. So what did he do?

MATTHEW COBB: He was a draper.

JAD: A draper?

MATTHEW COBB: Yeah, so he just sold cloth.

JAD: Oh. Huh.

MATTHEW COBB: He had no scientific training whatsoever. He was interested in microscopes.

JAD: Why would a draper be interested in microscopes?

MATTHEW COBB: It was his hobby. That's what he did. He made these microscopes.

JAD: And he was actually really good.

MATTHEW COBB: That's right.

JAD: Although you have to keep in mind that microscopes at that point in time—we're talking 1670s here—it's not exactly how we think of them now. Back then, they were just ...

MATTHEW COBB: Tiny balls of glass. And that's it.

JAD: And science itself was just a wee little baby.

MATTHEW COBB: You gotta really just put yourself back.

JAD: Okay, there was Leeuwenhoek doing really well with these microscopes, and pretty soon, scientists all over the place were asking him to look at stuff.

MATTHEW COBB: For example, what's in blood? Or, what's in sweat? Or, what's in semen?

JAD: Dun dun dun.

MATTHEW COBB: This is where it does get rather sordid.

JAD: Okay, so ...

ROBERT: Wait wait, Jad, before you—I would just—this is the point where we should tell our audience that some of the references from here on in will be a bit graphic. If you don't want to hear that kind of stuff ...

JAD: They'll be fine.

ROBERT: No, if you don't want to hear that stuff now, go out to the garden and, you know, check out the rabbits.

JAD: Okay. Now, getting back to the story. It's 1667. Just imagine. And Leeuwenhoek has just received a letter from the Royal Society of London, this big group of scientists, asking him to take a look at a drop of human semen.

MATTHEW COBB: Just to see what's in there.

JAD: And not to be graphic, but one autumn day ...

MATTHEW COBB: Autumn 1677.

JAD: He is in his bedroom.

MATTHEW COBB: Having conjugal relations with his wife, Cornelia.

JAD: He's got his microscope ready, plus a little vial.

MATTHEW COBB: And then, as he put it, within six beats of the pulse after he ejaculated, he got the semen and he put it into this very thin capillary tube, rushed over to the window. His wife's lying there thinking ...

JAD: What the hell are you doing?

MATTHEW COBB: Not again! Come on, will you? Enough with the microscopes already! And then he looks into the semen, and he can clearly see that there's a thing, there's something in there. Some kind of small structure.

JAD: He squints, and he focuses ...

MATTHEW COBB: And he can see all these wriggling things. It is just full, absolutely full, of these tiny eel-like things that he says are a vast number of living animalcules.

JAD: Animalcules?

MATTHEW COBB: Their bodies were rounding and furnished with a long, thin tail. They moved with a snakelike motion of the tail as eels do when swimming in water.

JAD: Wow, so what was he thinking at this point? Do we know?

MATTHEW COBB: I don't know. Putting myself in his place, I'd think, wow!

JAD: Because here's the thing. At this point in time, people didn't really understand where babies came from. They knew it had something to do with sex, but the notion of heredity was still very fuzzy, and how a baby developed was a total mystery.

MATTHEW COBB: What's life? How do you know if something's alive? In those days, one of the main things that they associated with life was movement.

JAD: Movement.

MATTHEW COBB: If stuff moved, it was alive.

JAD: So if movement is the key, you can imagine what Leeuwenhoek must have been thinking staring at these wriggling little beasts in the vial. Because they moved.

MATTHEW COBB: That's right.

JAD: Oh boy, did they move.

MATTHEW COBB: These things are trying to get somewhere. They're thrashing. They're desperate.

JAD: Maybe in this vial is the secret to life. To the soul. This is what people thought. It didn't take long before a pretty fantastic idea began to circulate, which is that not only is the sperm the vehicle of the soul, but if you could somehow zoom all the way down into its little head, you would find, in there, a little man.

ROBERT: Hello.

JAD: Hello.

MATTHEW COBB: This little chap all hunched up.

JAD: A little tiny guy.

MATTHEW COBB: A tiny human.

JAD: The thinking was that one day when the microscopes got better, you'd actually be able to see that tiny little human ...

MATTHEW COBB: With your own eyes.

JAD: Because it had to be there.

MATTHEW COBB: Because if the sperm is the sole source of life, then there must be something in there who'll look pretty much like a human being.

JAD: One problem though.

ROBERT: What?

JAD: If you were one of these folks who believed that the sperm was the soul, well, then you had to ask yourself, what does this say ...

MATTHEW COBB: About God, because it would mean He was creating all these souls, and then he was just wasting them. Leeuwenhoek did a calculation. He worked out that there were more semen, more spermatozoa, in an ejaculate of a cod—he got a cod and he opened it up and saw how many sperm there must be in its ejaculate—and he said there are—he was pretty much right—there are more sperm in this ejaculate than there are human beings alive on the planet, and that's just in one cod.

JAD: What? That's true?

MATTHEW COBB: Yeah.

JAD: Holy moly.

MATTHEW COBB: So you imagine all the men producing all this stuff all the time. That's an awful lot of souls if they're all potential human beings, just ...

JAD: Dying.

MATTHEW COBB: Well, all but one.

ROBERT: How many sperm are in a human ejaculate?

JAD: About 180 million.

ROBERT: Oh, see, that's nothing these days.

JAD: Yeah, it's like Brooklyn.

ROBERT: [laughs] You just live there. All right, this is Radiolab.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich. And our program today is about ...

JAD: By the way, 180 million is still a lot.

ROBERT: It's not a lot. It's not a lot.

JAD: Considering you only have a couple of eggs.

ROBERT: Who has a couple of eggs?

JAD: The lady has a couple of eggs. She has a finite number, whereas the guy is making millions every day.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm. That's right.

JAD: Anyhow, our program today is about sperm.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Stick around. Okay, in all seriousness, before we get started for real, I just want to tell you that this program does actually contain strong sexual material. Nothing too graphic, but this is your warning. Stick around. It'll be great.

ROBERT: Okay, for those of us who remain, let's get back to our basic question.

JAD: The "why so many" question?

ROBERT: Yes. Why is there such a startling asymmetry between the number of sexual cells produced by a male and the very relatively few eggs in a female?

TIM BIRKHEAD: Well, of course, this is the question.

ROBERT: I put the question to ...

TIM BIRKHEAD: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10.

ROBERT: Another—there's a lot of English people on the show today.

TIM BIRKHEAD: I'm Tim Birkhead. I work at the University of Sheffield in the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences.

ROBERT: And he is an expert on sperm.

TIM BIRKHEAD: In birds.

ROBERT: How did you choose this line of work?

TIM BIRKHEAD: Ever since I was a teenager, I was obsessed by birds. I was also obsessed by sex. And I managed to combine the two into an academic career. Isn't that lucky?

ROBERT: And in any case, he says this question of waste ...

TIM BIRKHEAD: Why on earth did God make so many sperm? It just didn't seem very sensible.

ROBERT: Well, this question not only troubled the church, it flummoxed science—flummoxed is I think the right word?

JAD: Flummoxed.

ROBERT: Scientists for a very long time.

TIM BIRKHEAD: It really wasn't until about the 1970s that finally the large numbers of sperm that males transfer to females finally began to make sense.

JAD: What happened in the 1970s?

ROBERT: Well, before the 1970s, bird scientists assumed if a female chose a spouse for the season, she would stick to the spouse for the season. She would be faithful. But in the '70s, when they looked a little more closely, they found there was more to the story.

ROBERT: Springtime in Somerset. The female bushy-tailed whippoorwill is always present in woods like this, always searching for that springtime joy of love. Her love song is very beautiful, as is his. Here he comes. And there is the act of love, consummated rather quickly. Now he's off to get his new sweetheart a juicy worm. She's at home for a time, and she—well, actually, she's hopping off to another bird. Em, it seems to be another male. She of course will remain loyal to this first partner. Oh dear. Cut the tape!

TIM BIRKHEAD: Prior to the 1970s, if people saw females behaving promiscuously, they assumed that there was something wrong with them.

ROBERT: What is wrong with this bird? Do you have another bird? Hey, Lance, have you got another bird?

TIM BIRKHEAD: Hormone imbalances or some kind of misunderstanding.

ROBERT: But then they discovered ...

TIM BIRKHEAD: DNA fingerprinting.

ROBERT: The DNA test.

TIM BIRKHEAD: Which provided a completely unequivocal test of paternity.

ROBERT: They'd go to a nest, say, and look at the five eggs in the nest, test the DNA, and discover that some of those eggs came from different dads.

TIM BIRKHEAD: Indicating that the female had mated with more than one male.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: One of these four men is the father, but she doesn't know which one.]

TIM BIRKHEAD: DNA fingerprinting gave us the evidence that, in fact, the majority of animals, the females are promiscuous.

ROBERT: Really? I mean, this is like, chimp babies? Chickadee babies? Chipmunk babies?

TIM BIRKHEAD: It's almost ubiquitous.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Let's find out the truth. You are not the father.]

TIM BIRKHEAD: At the moment, I'm only talking about non-humans.

JAD: Right. But what does this ...

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: ... female promiscuity thing have to do with the why so much sperm question? What's the connection?

ROBERT: Everything. Everything, because once people understood that that was going on, well, then the level of competition between males gets actually much more complicated.

JAD: What do you mean?

ROBERT: Well, if I am chasing a lady, now, not only do I have to worry about a competitor, but I have to worry about all the people I've never met who have been having sex with my girl. There's a whole level of ...

JAD: Oh, you mean like the sperm is competing?

ROBERT: The sperm is competing.

JAD: Not just the makers of the sperm, but the sperm itself.

ROBERT: The sperm itself! So there's outdoor competition, but now there's indoor competition.

TIM BIRKHEAD: Exactly.

ROBERT: If you get my drift.

TIM BIRKHEAD: And one very effective way of competing is simply to produce more sperm than the next guy. Okay, I think we need to step back a little bit. If females are promiscuous, natural selection is gonna favor the male that wins and fertilizes that particular female's eggs. As a consequence of that, males have evolved the most staggering array of adaptations to minimize their own chances of being cuckolded.

JAD: What does cuckolded mean?

ROBERT: Cuckolding means your wife is cheating on you and you don't know it.

JAD: Oh.

ROBERT: So what he's saying is that animals will go to elaborate lengths to be not cheated on. In fact, let me give you three spectacular illustrations, as never before heard on our program. We're going to begin ...

JAD: Which includes most things.

ROBERT: ... with sperm competition as displayed by, first ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The rove beetle.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Beetle!]

TIM BIRKHEAD: These beetles are amazing.

ROBERT: When the male beetle, the male rove beetle, has sex with a female, says Tim ...

TIM BIRKHEAD: They transfer the sperm in basically a package of sperm called a spermatophore. Once it's inside the female, it starts to swell and expand.

JAD: Like a balloon?

TIM BIRKHEAD: Yeah. In swelling and expanding, it pushes out or away any rival sperm.

JAD: Hey, hey, hey, but the sperm is stuck in a balloon.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: It's gotta get out.

ROBERT: Oh, yes, well, but the lady rove beetle has ...

TIM BIRKHEAD: A little structure, a structure like a tube ...

ROBERT: ... that will puncture the spermatophore ...

TIM BIRKHEAD: ... releasing the male's sperm.

JAD: No kidding.

TIM BIRKHEAD: Yeah, it's kind of like science fiction.

JAD: Wow.

ROBERT: But if you think the rove beetle has got something going on, let's meet ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The dragonfly.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Dragonfly!]

TIM BIRKHEAD: In dragonflies, males have the most elaborate and bizarre penis. It's covered with backward-pointing spines, hundreds of backward-pointing spines.

ROBERT: Kind of like, you know, bristles on a pipe cleaner.

TIM BIRKHEAD: And a very clever guy called Jeff Waage did a very clever experiment. He allowed male dragonflies to mate with females and separated them at different stages during their rather protracted copulation. And what he found was, halfway through the copulation, the male ...

ROBERT: Before he actually does the act.

TIM BIRKHEAD: ... is actually removing his penis from the female, and it's covered with sperm from the previous male and inseminated that female.

JAD: Oh, so he's brushing out the other guys.

TIM BIRKHEAD: Exactly.

JAD: That's rather shocking.

TIM BIRKHEAD: Yep.

ROBERT: But better still—better still is the duck.

JAD: The duck?

ROBERT: The duck.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yay, duck!]

TIM BIRKHEAD: Most birds don't have a penis, male birds. Ducks do.

JAD: That's it?

ROBERT: [laughs] No. It goes on.

TIM BIRKHEAD: Across different duck species, the penis size varies from very small to about 14 inches, something absolutely astronomical on a relatively small duck.

ROBERT: And the thing about the duck is—I don't quite know how to put this.

TIM BIRKHEAD: Ducks engage in forced extra-pair copulations.

ROBERT: What he's really saying is that the males are—are—they're raping the females.

JAD: Oof.

ROBERT: But wait. Because the females have a strategy of their own.

TIM BIRKHEAD: A couple of years ago, we were dissecting a female duck, and a postdoc called Patty Brennan called me into the lab. She said, "Look at this. I've just found this funny structure in the female's vagina." And what it was was a side branch.

ROBERT: Meaning instead of one, you know, clear highway right to the egg, this one had a kind of ...

JAD: Off-ramp?

ROBERT: Off-ramp.

TIM BIRKHEAD: I phoned a colleague in France who was a duck expert and he said he'd never seen such a thing, but give him 10 minutes and he'll go and check. So he obviously went off and dissected his own duck, phoned me back, and said, "My God, you're right."

ROBERT: There it was, an off-ramp in the French duck.

TIM BIRKHEAD: By which time we'd finished our dissection, and in fact ...

ROBERT: When the British took a look at their duck ...

TIM BIRKHEAD: In the duck that we looked at, there were two or three separate side branches. Patty then went on to do a comparative study of a lot of different duck species, and what we found was that, in species where the male had an enormous phallus, the female had the most complex vagina we'd ever come across. Some had two or three side branches and a very long spiral like a corkscrew at the end of the vagina. And if you think about it, what seems very likely here is that the female has got these structures to deflect the male. If she's being raped, she might contract part of her reproductive trap to send the male off down a blind alley. If he avoids that, she can just tighten up the spiral so his sperm can't get to the right place.

ROBERT: So what you've got here is a kind of warfare. The male says, "All right, I'm coming in there, like it or not." And the female says, "Well, you're getting nowhere, like it or not."

JAD: Go female ducks.

TIM BIRKHEAD: Remarkable case of females evolving counter-adaptations to keep males at arm's length. Or penis length.

JAD: [laughs]

TIM BIRKHEAD: So to speak.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: So this is Maverick and Buckles. They are African geese.

ROBERT: The British male scientist section of our program is coming briefly to a pause so we can meet an American and a female.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: My name is Joanna Ellington.

ROBERT: Joanna Ellington.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: I am a PhD in reproductive physiology.

ROBERT: We spoke with her at her farm in, yes, Washington state.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: So we have 70 acres here, and I was a veterinarian before I did my PhD.

ROBERT: You are an andrologist?

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Yes. An andrologist, the study of male reproduction.

ROBERT: Andro- for man ...

JOANNA ELLINGTON: ... and -ology is study of. Yes.

ROBERT: Yeah.

WOMAN: Where are the pigs?

JOANNA ELLINGTON: They're right—the pigs are over here, sleeping. They're going to be bred today. We actually have semen flying in from Nebraska. We're gonna go down here to the chicken coop.

ROBERT: And while she's walking to the chicken coop, let me just say, we finally come to a human sperm expert to ask about us.

JAD: Yeah, and? I mean, this competition thing, does it work like that with us?

ROBERT: Well, that's the real surprise to me. We've all seen the sex education films, you know, when you're in fourth or fifth grade.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The woman's own defense system attacks the sperm. They are unwelcome cells from another organism, and they are potential enemies.]

ROBERT: But when Joanna gave me her version of all this, it was not like that at all. Let me start from the beginning. First ...

JOANNA ELLINGTON: The sperm have to get through the cervix. The woman's cervical mucus has a lot of fibers in it that are criss-crossed.

ROBERT: So you'd think there'd be this big ...

JOANNA ELLINGTON: ... mesh ...

ROBERT: ... barrier that they couldn't get through.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The barriers are numerous.]

ROBERT: But ...

JOANNA ELLINGTON: When the woman ovulates, the hormones in her body make all those fibers in the cervical mucus line up.

ROBERT: Ooh.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: And they basically make a little highway that the sperm can swim through. Zip, zip, zip.

ROBERT: Not only is she welcoming them in, she's making sure that they don't get lost.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: They are directed to the side that has the egg on it.

ROBERT: Oh, because there are some tubes with eggs and some tubes without?

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Right.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: One fallopian tube leads to the waiting egg, the other to an empty tube.]

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Except for the woman's body says, "Over here guys, this side."

ROBERT: And most surprising of all is that halfway through the journey, there's a rest period in—it's called the fallopian tube.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: The fallopian tube says, "Oh, great. We know that you guys are here. We know that you're pretty fragile guys. So we're gonna change the type of sugar proteins that we make. We're gonna make sugar proteins that you're bathed in and you just hang out here until an egg comes."

ROBERT: Oh, so we're now in the waiting room?

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Yes.

ROBERT: And we're being sugared?

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Yes.

ROBERT: This sounds nice.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: It is nice.

ROBERT: Sounds like a little Roman moment, everybody's lying down and kind of getting a towel wash or something.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: They're very quiet at that point. Metabolically, they're quiet.

ROBERT: The female is essentially telling them, "Shh. Wait. Not yet. Not yet."

JOANNA ELLINGTON: They can live in the fallopian tube for two, three, four days, maybe even a week.

JAD: A week?

ROBERT: Yep. [laughs]

JAD: You're kidding.

ROBERT: Until her egg is ready. That's when she says ...

JOANNA ELLINGTON: "Hey, we just ovulated. You need to let the guys go." And the sperm are released and start swimming up the track.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: They swim in dense bunches ...]

JOANNA ELLINGTON: To meet the egg.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... in search of the egg.]

ROBERT: And the rest of it, of course, you know.

JAD: Huh. Never heard about the sugar room before. I mean, that seems like news.

ROBERT: Yeah, in the fallopian tubes? Yeah. Neither had I. This had been discussed by scientists, but there was no evidence to prove that it was so. But Joanna ...

JOANNA ELLINGTON: As a good scientist ...

ROBERT: She was the first to provide the evidence, she says.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: After I had my last son, I told my doctor, I said, "My husband and I are gonna have intercourse. You are going to do my tubal ligation and cut out my tube, and we're going to get pictures of the sperm stored in the human fallopian tube." So we did. [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs] So you counted your husband's guys.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Yes, yes.

ROBERT: At the gate.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Yeah. There weren't very many there. Just a few.

ROBERT: How many were there?

JOANNA ELLINGTON: He had about 20 in the fallopian tube that we looked at.

ROBERT: Oh, man. That seems like a fragilely low number.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Well, it is, but you have to remember that you only need one.

JAD: Wow, that blows my mind. I mean, that's like 20 little potential souls lost at the gate.

ROBERT: The cool thing is that, yes, there is this level of competition still, but underneath, there is this substrate of male–female cooperation. It's much more an act of teamwork than one would have supposed.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Hazel's sperm just arrived. Thought I'd let you guys know.

JAD: Oh.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Come here, girls!

GIRL: ... get pregnant?

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Yeah, they're gonna get pregnant.

JAD: Hazel? Who's Hazel?

ROBERT: That's her pig.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Hazel!

ROBERT: Is it a big box, or, what is it?

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Uh, it's a white Styrofoam cooler.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: Go ahead and scratch Hazel's back, Sagey.

JOANNA ELLINGTON: We'll end up putting probably about a half a cup into Hazel.

ROBERT: Wow. How long did it take Mr. Pig to make a half a cup?

JOANNA ELLINGTON: [laughs] Pigs make a lot of sperm.

JAD: Robert. We gotta leave the farm.

ROBERT: Not yet. No, come on.

JAD: Come on, we gotta go to break. Sorry.

ROBERT: So you're gonna miss some stuff about the pig.

JAD: Radiolab will continue in a moment.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message one ...]

[JOANNA ELLINGTON: Radiolab is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Science Foundation. Radiolab is produced by WNYC and distributed by National Public Radio.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

JAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Our topic today is ...

ROBERT: Sperm, actually.

JAD: That's right.

ROBERT: And what is a sperm, if not one teeny-tiny little dad?

JAD: Oh, it's much more than that.

ROBERT: Well ...

JAD: It's the soul. It's everything.

ROBERT: [laughs] Well, we're gonna just leave you in the garage. And turn to Kathleen LaBounty, who a few years ago sat down to try to draw a picture of her dad, and this is the picture that she drew.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: I drew a picture of a sperm. It wasn't very impressive. [laughs] It was like a cartoon sperm with blue eyes and brown hair and a little bit of a mustache. And then I had a really big question mark behind the sperm. And that was to represent the fact that I don't know this man's identity.

ROBERT: This might sound like your typical magic marker paints a sperm donor story. But it's really not. And here to tell us about it is reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Should I just kind of take it from the top?

ROBERT: Yeah.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Okay. Kathleen lives in Houston.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And when she was eight, her mom began telling her rather repeatedly, "Kathleen, there's something special about you."

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: And I really wasn't that curious, but she kept saying it so many times that eventually I just said, "Okay, what is it that makes me different?" So she took me upstairs, sat me on my bed, and she just said that the man who raised you is not your biological father. We had to go to a sperm bank, and that a very nice man gave us his sperm so that you could be born. And then she said that I could still consider my dad to be my father, even though he wasn't my biological father. Right afterwards, I just ran downstairs and I threw my arms around my dad's neck and he was on the computer, and I just told him that I loved him, and he didn't know that I had just been told that I wasn't his biological daughter.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So she just took it in, and it was a source of joy for her initially.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: It felt kind of magical.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: It felt magical.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Yeah, it was just unique.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: It didn't completely sink in at first.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Things started to change as she got older. She just became aware of all these things that were different ...

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: ... between me and my family.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Okay, so I've got the picture out of me and my cousins.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: So in family photos I kind of don't blend in.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: The obvious thing is my height. I'm 5'2", and all of my cousins are between 5'10" and 6'5".

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Wow!

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: [laughs] Yeah.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So that's like a foot taller?

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Right. So that was one thing.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And then there were lots of other things, like, she had blue eyes, whereas the rest of her family had ...

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: ... mainly brown.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And she had these drawing abilities.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: My mom, she can barely draw stick figures.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: She is a vegetarian.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: I'm the only one in my family, and so I was kind of wondering if that desire to take care of anything living maybe came from him. I just became more curious about how this man contributed to who I am.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: What did you know about him?

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: The only information that I got is that he attended Baylor College of Medicine.

ROBERT: Baylor is where?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Texas.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: In 1981, when I was conceived. But I don't know if he was a first-year or second, third, or fourth-year student.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And that's it?

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Correct.

ROBERT: That was—that's not very much.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah. So when she was a teenager, she contacted the clinic ... KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: ... trying to request medical records. And I was told that they were destroyed years ago.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Hmm.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: I feel like I lost part of me.

ROBERT: So can she solve this in any way? What is she gonna do?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, one night, when she was in college, and this was a few years later, her mom just happened to be watching TV.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Every year, 30,000 children are born in this country to mothers who have been artificially inseminated with sperm from an anonymous donor.]

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And she saw a special ...

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: ... about the Donor Sibling Registry.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... a place called the DonorSiblingRegistry.com]

ROBERT: Oh, it's a website?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: It's a website.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: To try to help donors and donor offspring and half-siblings find each other.

[NEWS CLIP: CBS News 60 Minutes.]

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: So after my mother saw this show, I decided to register.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So she logged on ...

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: ... pressed "clinic" ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: ... and she put into the search engine, "Baylor College of Medicine."

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Baylor College of Medicine.

ROBERT: And?

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: And there was actually a girl around my age ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: A young woman named Jessica.

ROBERT: Which means they could be, uh ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Sisters.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: So she and I got in touch and started to talk.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Right away, they noticed that they had a lot of things in common.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: We both have polycystic ovarian syndrome.

ROBERT: Which is...?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Which is a genetic syndrome that you would inherit.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: And we were on the exact same medication and the same dosage.

ROBERT: Oh!

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And that seemed like more than a coincidence.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Just kind of sparked our curiosity.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And so they decided that they would meet up.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: She came and spent a weekend with me. By the time she left, we had come up with a list of 100 similarities.

ROBERT: A hundred?

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: On our list, we had that we can't roll our tongues. Both born in 1982. We both have curly hair. We both had high cholesterol. We don't have any sense of direction.

ROBERT: Oh, I know what this is. This is what you do when you want something to be true.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: We both had butterfly tattoos.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Absolutely.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: We have the same taste in music.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: When you, I think, want to believe ...

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: We're both very thoughtful ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: ... all these things that would otherwise I think maybe escape detection ...

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: We found that our handwriting was pretty similar.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: ... all of a sudden become really important.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: It just goes on and on.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So they decide to have a DNA test.

ROBERT: And?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And the results come back ...

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: They called her and then she called me. I mean, you can hear people's disappointment and sadness, so I knew before she said anything. I think it was a .001 percent probability that we were sisters.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Just like that, this possibility was gone.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: I began to feel loss and grief. Like I look in the mirror and I see a stranger looking back at me.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Okay, so, fast forward now a couple of years. She goes to a library.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: A library in the medical center.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: She walks over to the stacks, pulls out ...

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: The old Baylor yearbooks.

ROBERT: The old Baylor what?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yearbooks. She figured, as long as he showed up to get his picture taken on picture day, he'd be in one of those books.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Exactly.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So ...

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: I took them off the shelf and I photocopied every page in those yearbooks. The 1979, 1980, '81, '82, '83, and '84 yearbooks.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And she took them home.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: I was expecting to flip through it and not see any similarities with any of the men and then get to one picture and think, "Okay, this is the man." But that's definitely not what happened. [laughs]

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Instead ...

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: I realized that I look like dozens if not hundreds of the men. And I would think that I had one man's nose and another man's eyes and another man's chin.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Even this guy. I mean, I think it's possible because of the rounded eyebrows and bigger eyes.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: I just got overwhelmed.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So she decided to enlist some help.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Right. So I had my mom and three of my closest friends take sticky tabs and flip through the photos of all the men. They might say, "Well, you kind of look like this man," or, "You kind of look like this other man." And then they would mark the men who they thought resembled me the most.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: She then decided she would draft a letter.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: A letter. 

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: "'Dear Doctor: It is after much thought that I am contacting you.'"

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: I was thinking, "Well, I'll write the men who were consistently picked out."

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: "I was conceived May 4, 1981, by an anonymous sperm donation through a Baylor College of Medicine Student."

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: I tried to think, "Okay, if I were a donor, what would my concerns be?"

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: "I want to assure you that I am emotionally stable and financially secure. To provide additional reassurance to donors, I have been using a non-legally binding DNA test that cannot be used in court."

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: And then I just explained. I think I—I tried to give an overview of who I am.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: "I have large, almost navy blue eyes. I barely reach 5'2'. Both my mother and I have A positive blood. I am attaching my photograph to see if you recognize my face."

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: And then I just said, "Thank you for your time. Sincerely, Kathleen."

ROBERT: And so she actually sends it out, the letter?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: A round of 25 letters ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: To the men that looked most like her.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Another round of 50. My biggest fear was that my letters would not be acknowledged. I had been told for so long that my donor wouldn't want to know about me, he wouldn't care that I exist. I mean, I thought if I sent out 25 letters, maybe one would take the time to respond to me.

ROBERT: Did she get anything back?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: She did.

ROBERT: What'd they say?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, I mean, some of them were what you might expect.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: "Wow. Your letter was unexpected." "Dear Kathleen ..." "Take me off your mailing list and do not ever contact me again."

DANIEL ZAK: I remember, just before my shift started, it was at 10:30 am. I rummaged through the mailbox and saw a letter that was addressed to myself, Dr. Daniel, Zak. I live just outside Seattle, and I remember—I practice emergency medicine—opening the letter and the first sentence or two, I thought, "Uh-oh."

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Oh, see, here's one that's hand-written.

DANIEL ZAK: I wasn't sure that it would be anonymous and that there would be no way for anyone to track me down, even if they wanted to.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: "Though your motivations may be innocent, please consider the ramifications for others by the knowledge you seek."

DANIEL ZAK: I felt that I would never be contacted.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: But then, there were others. Like this guy.

MERRIMON BAKER: I think I called her right away. I'm Merrimon Baker. I'm an orthopedic surgeon who lives in the Houston area. And I said, "Well, I was a donor, I think 25 years ago, and I'd never thought this day would come."

ROBERT: What does that mean?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: He—I wrote this one line down that he said. He said, "That's how really good things happen."

MERRIMON BAKER: You know, that's usually the way really good things happen, they come out of the blue. I'm 51 now and I don't have any kids. You know, not having kids would be the last thing I would've guessed, you know, 35 or 40 years ago, from my own perspective, but I've always been very work-oriented. All of a sudden, you kind of look up and, you know, a few years have passed by and you don't have any kids yet, so, the prospect of having, you know, a daughter out there somewhere that I didn't know about was—was, quite frankly, kind of a rush.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: He called me and we just talked about interests and our personality, and we started finding similarities.

MERRIMON BAKER: Her mother had requested a blue-eyed donor, which I am. She has A positive blood, which would be compatible with mine. And it gets even more eerie.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Like the fact that we had both studied psychology.

MERRIMON BAKER: Psychology, my major in college.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: And ...

MERRIMON BAKER: ... our cumulative grade point average was identical. She certainly could be my daughter on many fronts. So I spoke with my mother at length. She was extraordinarily excited at the prospect of having a grandchild, and she prepared a place for her at Christmas dinner with her name on it.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Wow.

ROBERT: Did—did they get the DNA test?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Not exactly. They just kept waiting.

MERRIMON BAKER: Probably subconsciously, I almost didn't really want to know.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Right. You know, let's just not even open up the results of the test. Let's just assume that we're—it's a match. We get along so well, why does it matter? But at the same time, we both knew that we needed to know the truth.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: In the end, they finally went through with it.

MERRIMON BAKER: I mean, it was kind of a running lottery about, you know, what do you think? And I was pretty impressed at the fact that it was probably gonna be positive. The results come back from the lab, and it, you know ...

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: This is what a DNA test looks like. Yellow is basic information.

MERRIMON BAKER: It has this information about this and that in terms of the DNA.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: I have no idea what blue, green, gray, pink ... [laughs]

MERRIMON BAKER: And at the bottom it's, you know, kind of yes or no.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: The probability equals zero percent.

MERRIMON BAKER: It was like zero percent chance that it was positive.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: He wrote me, and he said, "I am heartbroken. I am so sorry this was negative." And I think it took him about three or four weeks before he felt up to speaking to me again.

MERRIMON BAKER: Yes. You know, I mean, I've always thought I'd be a good dad, and, you know, I—I guess it was kind of like, it would have been kind of nice to have a child out there who's a well-adjusted, intelligent person. You know, it's kind of all the things you'd want your kid to be.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: And that's what almost made me stop my search.

ROBERT: So did she stop then?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: She does exactly the opposite.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: I wrote every single male who went to Baylor from '79 to '84.

ROBERT: Which is how many males?

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: 600. Yeah. [laughs] Out of those 600, 250 responded.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Wow.

ROBERT: Wow. Half of them write her back.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah.

ROBERT: That's so weird.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Exactly. That was exactly my reaction.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Weirder still?

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Not only did they respond, but they were very supportive. "Dear Ms. LaBounty, You are clearly someone who thinks and feels deeply. That makes you special." One guy sent me a Christmas card. "You sound and look like a remarkable young woman." This one says, "I would claim you in a second." I'm trying to read his handwriting. Doctor's handwriting. "Dear Kathleen, I've waited 26 years to receive a letter like this." This is a man who's actually a friend of mine now. I've met him and I've met his wife. This one's really sweet too.

ROBERT: Wait, well, wait a minute. What about that guy at the beginning that went, "Uh-oh."

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Dr. Dan Zak?

ROBERT: Yeah, him.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Even he came around.

DANIEL ZAK: As time has progressed since I initially read the letter, now I'm almost sorry that she's not my biologic daughter. That would've been kind of fun.

ROBERT: Hm. And of all those, has anyone else agreed to do a paternity test?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: All told, she's had 16 DNA tests.

ROBERT: Have they all turned out negative?

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Every—every test came back as negative. But I still feel like I probably have the answer in front of me. I just don't know which page is his.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: It just—just, real quick—so I realize it's 12 now. The song, I don't know if you, I mean ...

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Yes, I was just thinking about that too.

MAN: Go ahead and play some of it.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Okay.

MAN: I just need to get a little ...

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Whenever I've heard "Somewhere Out There," ever since I was a kid, it would remind me of my biological father and that he is out there. When I was a kid, sometimes I would look up at the sky and I would think that I—I literally know nothing about my father except that we were both looking at the exact same sky.

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: Yeah, that's as far as I got.

MAN: What do you mean, that's as far as you got?

KATHLEEN LABOUNTY: I never learned the ending. I'm still working on it. [laughs]

JAD: That story from Ari Daniel Shapiro and Lulu Miller, our producer. Time for a break. Radiolab will continue in a moment.

[LISTENER: This is Adrian Stein from New Brunswick, New Jersey. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Our topic today is sperm.

ROBERT: A wiggly cell that, along with male pattern baldness, seems to describe everything you need to know about being a man.

JAD: And speaking of which, let's ask now one of the bigger questions that you can ask in a show about sperm, which is, why are there sperm? Why are there men?

ROBERT: What?

JAD: Yeah, why are there men? This is a real question.

STEVE JONES: A biological question which is completely baffling.

JAD: That is Steve Jones.

STEVE JONES: Hi, I'm a professor of genetics at University College, London.

JAD: He wrote a book called The Descent of Man, where he speculates about how we men got our start, and why we've managed to stick around so long. That's the real question. Here's his theory.

STEVE JONES: Let's imagine ourselves in the primeval soup, okay. Three thousand million years ago. It was actually minestrone, because it was lumpy like that. And the lumps were cells. [EAGER VOICE: Hello! ]

STEVE JONES: And ...

JAD: To reproduce ...

STEVE JONES: These cells ...

JAD: What they'd have to do is gather up their energy and, all on their own, split in half.

[EAGER VOICE: Hello! Hello!] 

STEVE JONES: Make copies of themselves, which are more or less identical.

JAD: Most of the time. The normal flow of events is these cells are copying and copying and copying. Every so often, there would be a copying error.

[EAGER VOICE: Hello!]

JAD: A mutation. These were happening all the time.

[VARIOUS VOICES: Hello. Hello? Hello! Hello. Hello.]

JAD: Most were harmless. But ...

STEVE JONES: One of these mutations caused the cell that received it to behave in a different way.

JAD: This new cell ...

[SCARY VOICE: How ya doin'?]

JAD: ... through the randomness of nature, it had acquired a talent. Instead of dividing on its own, it figured out that it could save some energy ...

STEVE JONES: ... if it could swim up to another cell ...

[EAGER VOICE: Hello!]

[SCARY VOICE: How ya doin'?]

JAD: ... burrow its way in ...

STEVE JONES: ... and force that second cell to divide.

[SCARY VOICE: How ya doin'? How ya doin'?]

STEVE JONES: By so doing ...

JAD: ... not only was it avoiding a lot of work ...

STEVE JONES: ... it was copying its own genes. And at that moment, males were born. 

[CHORUS OF SCARY VOICES: How ya doin'?]

ROBERT: [laughs] That's what you're saying? Is that guys are essentially moochers. Like they live off—

JAD: Well, that's how we got our start, according to this theory.

STEVE JONES: Males began through selfishness.

JAD: These little cells began to mooch off of other cells. Then they figured out, you know, over time, they could mooch better if they got smaller.

STEVE JONES: They're small ...

JAD: ... and faster.

STEVE JONES: ... and as mobile as they possibly can. Because then they can fuse with more and more of the other kind of cells and persuade them to divide.

JAD: So now ...

ROBERT: Yeah?

JAD: If you want a definition that encompasses all males, everywhere ...

STEVE JONES: ... from oak trees to elephants to humans to fish, there's only one real universal definition of what it means to be male. It's the sex that makes small sex cells, and often lots of them.

JAD: That's it. We make the small sex cells.

STEVE JONES: That really is the mark of the male, having a tiny sex cell.

JAD: Meaning you, me, Steve ...

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: At the core of it, our maleness is defined by these little tiny swimming packets of genes, what we now call sperm.

ROBERT: But you know what I don't understand. If all males are are—

JAD: Parasite?

ROBERT: Yeah. But why would the female cells allow us to do that? Why don't they just say, "Go away"?

JAD: And that's a big question, because there are some species that have dispensed with males altogether.

ROBERT: Really?

STEVE JONES: Yes, the one that comes to mind is a California lizard, which is quite common.

JAD: It's called the whiptail lizard, and they live in the Mojave Desert.

STEVE JONES: And they're all female, as far as we can see. There have been no males around for a long, long time. It's kind of strange, because they actually caught each other, and one female gets on top of the other and tries to mate with it. So there's some kind of remnant of male behavior there, but they're all female.

JAD: But how is it that they make little lizards?

STEVE JONES: They just produce eggs which develop into lizards.

JAD: Oh!

STEVE JONES: They just don't bother with males.

ROBERT: So the baby is identical to the mommy, so we're talking about cloning, here.

JAD: Yeah.

STEVE JONES: You know, plenty of birds can do that. I mean, chickens often lay eggs which develop without having been fertilized.

JAD: Frogs, he says there's some frogs that can do it too. But here's the thing. Even though making babies without men is, according to some scientists, the most efficient way to do it, to reproduce, it's still pretty rare.

STEVE JONES: There are very few land vertebrates which are all female.

JAD: Which brings us back to your question. Why?

STEVE JONES: Why do females not make huge efforts to escape from it?

ROBERT: That's what I want to know. Why are we here? Why have males hung around this long? I mean, we shouldn't be doing this program. Somebody named Alice and someone named Laura should be here.

PRODUCER: Hi, I'm Alice Abumrad.

LULU: And I'm Laura Krulwich.

PRODUCER: And this is Radio ...

JAD: Hey! Not so fast, ladies.

LULU: Wait.

JAD: We're still here. And as for why we're still here, eh, there are tons of theories. Steve's best guess is that, you know what, we're not just parasites. We do offer the ladies one thing in return.

LULU: Like what?

JAD: Well, Lulu, going back to the soupy days at the beginning, just imagine, says Steve, what if that soupy sea is changing.

STEVE JONES: The water's getting warmer, and the water's getting saltier.

JAD: So let's say on one side of the pond there's a cell that mutates, and suddenly, it can handle warm water. On the other side, there's a cell that mutates, and suddenly, it can handle salt. If this is an all-female world, the warmies would copy themselves, the salties would copy themselves, and every new member of both of these tribes would ...

STEVE JONES: Die. Because the water's both warm and salty.

JAD: Because they couldn't combine their talents. But, if one of the, say, salty cells is a male ...

[SCARY VOICE: How you doing?]

JAD: Well, that male can swim up to a warmy cell, do his male invader thing ...

STEVE JONES: ... and in the next generation, anti-warm and anti-salt can get together. So that's what males do. They bring female lines together and allow them to mix their genes.

JAD: And that may be ...

STEVE JONES: ... that may be so important ...

JAD: ... says Steve, that the only time you can do without males is if your world is static. Wait, what about the lizards?

STEVE JONES: Yeah, well that's the interesting question, and I think the answer is, maybe, you know, we're—kind of guesswork here—they live out in the desert. The desert doesn't change very much. The enemy is always the same, which is heat, shortage of food. That enemy isn't something like disease or parasite which are constantly evolving, themselves. So they can afford to get one set of genes, which are very effective, clone themselves by not having sex, whereas other creatures can't.

JAD: Does that mean, you think, that if our world were like that, that if we'd somehow perfected it, that we wouldn't need men?

STEVE JONES: That's arguably true. Um, and, oh my God, I feel like there's somebody buzzing on the doorbell now. That's gotta stop. I ain't gonna be having a bloody nuclear explosion going on outside here. Jesus Christ, it's normally quiet as the grave in here. Okay, all right. If we lived in an unchanging world, maybe we wouldn't need men. But we don't live in a world that doesn't change. Look at the AIDS virus. Look at bird flu. They're out there. They're waiting to get you. And they're gonna get lots of us sooner or later with a new epidemic, which itself has changed genetically. And you're gonna need the males to mix up the genes to make sure that the whole species doesn't disappear. So that, you know, I think we males are due for a brief moment of quiet self-congratulation.

JAD: Robert, I've never told you this, but you're a really good guy.

ROBERT: And you are spectacular.

JAD: Thanks! [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

STEVE JONES: Yeah. The prospect of a world without men seemed remote until the invention of the deep freeze. Because you can freeze sperm and use it.

[WOMAN: I do like blue eyes. Look at that one, MENSA!]

STEVE JONES: And it can be used after their death.

[WOMAN: Maybe I'm not ready yet.]

STEVE JONES: So don't congratulate yourself that you're always gonna have a world with men in it. You may just have a world with freezers in it.

JAD: [laughs] Steve Jones wrote the book Y: The Descent of Men. Moving right along, the idea of like a world without men, or a world where men have been replaced by freezers?

ROBERT: It's not men replaced by freezers, it's sperm frozen in freezers.

JAD: Yeah, yeah, whatever.

ROBERT: That's frozen men in freezers.

JAD: Yes, okay, fine.

ROBERT: Frozen little baby men.

JAD: I want to tell you a story that's gonna wipe that smile right off your face, Krulwich. [laughs] It comes from one of our favorite reporters, NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Hello, Radiolab.

JAD: Hello.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: [laughs] So, should I just introduce this person?

JAD: Yeah.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Okay.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: My name is Leisha Nebel Taylor.

JAD: Leisha Nebel-Taylor. Okay.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: And I live in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Basically, um ...

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: I love animals.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Back in 1995, Leisha and her husband, John, were living in New York City.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: In a mouse-infested, cheesy little dump in Park Slope.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: They were this young couple in their 30s. She was working at like a daycare center.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: I did basically creative movement.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: With little kids.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: Under five.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: And he was a super in this big apartment building.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: On the Upper East Side. And ...

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: She and her husband both got some horrible flu.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: And I can remember laying in bed, both—and we flipped a quarter to see who would go make the can of chicken noodle soup, and I said, "What would we do if we had kids right now?" And I can remember laying there in that bed, and John goes, "We'd set—we'd set that child up right there on the floor and throw some toys down there and we'd both lean over the edge." I had never been so sick.

JAD: Did she have any idea what made them sick?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: No, just one of those things. And, you know, she got better.

JAD: What about him?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: He didn't get better.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: He was throwing up, cold, cough.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Did you guys think it was just like the flu?

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: Flu, yeah.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: But he was getting sicker and sicker, and at some point he was like having trouble kind of breathing. And so Leisha was just like, we're going to the emergency room.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: They wheeled him into the emergency room. First nurse we see, she says, "Oh my God, John. Why did you wait so long?"

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: All of a sudden, he's like in the ICU.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: Well, it's funny. While John was in the hospital, I snapped three photographs of him. I was gonna say to him, "See what you put me through?" [laughs] "See what you looked like," because I don't think he would have ever believed how many tubes and how many things were coming out of him.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: A couple days later, he had a cardiac arrest. And after that ...

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: ... he's brain dead. And I went home that night, you know—I'm right across the street—I went home and I—I saw our whole lives go right out the door. It was, as I looked out over that East River. I saw the kids we weren't gonna have. That—that fear of, oh my God, I'm gonna lose everything.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: And then she remembered something. Something that had happened about six months before.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: John and I had seen something on the news.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Hours after Anthony Baez died in a confrontation with police, his widow told her sister-in-law, "I want his baby."]

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: This one day, before she went to work, she had seen this report about a man who had died, a young man who had died, and when he was lying there in the morgue, family members of his wife actually said to the doctors, "Is there any way that you can save his sperm?"

[ARCHIVE CLIP: The family called in a New York hospital urologist, Peter Schlegel.]

PETER SCHLEGEL: I'm Peter Schlegel, and I'm urologist-in-chief at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: ... who had removed sperm from many men before, but never a dead one.]

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Had you been to the morgue before?

PETER SCHLEGEL: Nope. It's probably not quite as clean as on TV, and, certainly, working with a dead body is different.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Schlegel says Mrs. Baez would have an excellent chance of conceiving with the sperm he retrieved if that's what she decided to do. Warren Levinson, New York.]

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: And I said to John, I go, "Wow! Is that wild or what? What do you think of that?"

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: She said that John was like in the bathroom ...

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: I mean, you know, he was brushing his teeth.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: You know, in his usual rush to get off to work. And she said to him, like, "If you died, would you be okay with me doing that?"

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: He says, "Well, if it's really tragic," he goes, "Go for it."

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Then later on, she went to work. Remember she works at this, like, daycare kind of center, and she mentioned it to somebody at work, and one of the women who worked there pointed to a kid and said, "You see that kid? His father is the doctor who removed the sperm."

JAD: Wow! No kidding.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: And so she's remembering all of this six months later.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: I went, "Oh, that little boy's dad."

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: You know, her husband is brain dead at this point, and what she decides to do is ...

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: ... go to work ...

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: ... and find the name of that kid whose ...

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: ... father ...

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: ... had taken the sperm.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: So you pick up the phone and ...

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: ... got an appointment with him right away. That Wednesday, I went and saw Peter Schlegel. And that Thursday, John, he died around six o'clock. Sorry.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: I'm really sorry.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: We were best friends.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: A team came into his room. She waited outside.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: What do you actually need to do a procedure like this?

PETER SCHLEGEL: Basically, a vasectomy.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: They take a needle, put it into the man's body ...

PETER SCHLEGEL: One of the richest sources of sperm would be the vas, the tube that normally carries sperm from the area around the testicles to the ejaculatory regions.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: They literally put the needle ...

PETER SCHLEGEL: ... into that tube ...

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: ... and suck the sperm out.

PETER SCHLEGEL: So you're left with a little one-inch-tall conical tube that has tens of millions or maybe even hundreds of millions of sperm within it.

JAD: You know, I can't help but won—ask myself the question. Well, maybe I'll just ask you. Would you do this?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Absolutely.

JAD: Really.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: No question in my mind. I've been married eight years. I don't have children. I want to have children with my husband, and if he died, I would absolutely do it. And no ethicist at a hospital is gonna be able to tell me no, because I got my husband to put it in his will.

JAD: Why?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: So that there'd be no question, if he died, that I would have permission to do this.

JAD: But why are you so certain? Isn't there part of you that's a little hesitant about it, what it really means?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: What would it really mean?

JAD: I don't know. That you're somehow—I mean, at the very least, it's a kid without a dad. And also, like, the kid would have your husband's eyes and his nose and his ears, and so it would be kind of like an echo of him, a reminder.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: There is nothing that I would want more. Honestly. I mean, you know, if my husband died, there is nothing I would want more than, than a child of his.

JAD: Huh.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: But, you know, I—Peter Schlegel, what Peter Schlegel told me is that ...

PETER SCHLEGEL: In most cases ...

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Women do not use the sperm.

PETER SCHLEGEL: Women will not go forward and use those sperm.

JAD: Really?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: They collect it, time passes, maybe they meet someone else ...

PETER SCHLEGEL: ... and decide to move on with their life.

JAD: That's interesting. And what about Leisha? Did she, uh, did she move on?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Well, no.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: If I—if I was standing at 70 and looking back at my life, then I'd have to kick myself if I didn't do this. It would have been out of fear that I didn't. Because everybody kind of looks at it like, "God, that's so weird. That's—what are you gonna tell this kid? Oh, you came from somebody dead? How would you explain this to your child?" And simply, well, with the truth. I loved your father. He died. I saved his sperm post-mortem so that I could bring you into the world. You are indeed a part of him and you are indeed a part of me.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: After John died, she moved back to Wisconsin, and she waited for a while. Her life was moving on. She had relationships with other people. But she didn't let go of the idea. Finally, six years after her husband died, she decided that she was gonna do it.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: I think it really came down to me making a decision about doing it on my own.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: You know, she called and she made an appointment at a fertility clinic back in New York.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: I had gone out in September, like the day before the planes flew into the World Trade Center, and the city felt solemn.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: For Leisha, it seemed like signs were everywhere, signs of fate.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: I guess it was just such a big part in the coincidences.

JAD: Like what?

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: Well, it was pretty amazing in that the in vitro center was in the building where John and I made love. I mean, it was in that building.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: You know, the doctor's office where she was getting the fertility treatments were in her old building. It was such a coincidence that she'd even seen that news report.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: And the fact that it was the doctor's little boy I was teaching.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: That her cat died, you know, while she was in New York, and she sort of had this idea that ...

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: With this death, this life comes.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Things were dying, but there was gonna be new light.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: I had all these eggs, and the chances of it working were really big. I was for sure gonna get pregnant. You know, all of these things just came together so it felt natural and right.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: A fertility clinic technician thawed this frozen, six-year-old sperm, injected it into the eggs, and then they waited.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: I mean, had you, like, gotten nursery stuff ready and stuff? Like were you at that point, level of certainty?

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: I had gone out and shopped and yeah, I—I had it all picked out.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: But none of the eggs fertilized.

JAD: None?

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: None.

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: It was like another death. I mean, it was just, it was like another death.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: She had told me that she had John cremated and that she had sort of half of his ashes still in her house and that she didn't know really what she was gonna do with them, that she knew at some point she had to scatter them or something, but she hadn't really worked out a plan. And, you know, I pointed out that, well, she's got this sperm stored too, like ...

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Do you think that that's something that you want to somehow do something with? Or will it be there forever?

LEISHA NEBEL-TAYLOR: Until there's a power outage. No, I'm just—I'm so cynical. Um, it doesn't amount to anything. It's, it's the thing that's there that isn't. It's like the chair. It's—it's not who he is. Or was.

JAD: Nell Greenfieldboyce. Thanks to her. Thank you to NPR and to NPR Science Desk.

ROBERT: Anything you heard today you can hear again on our website, radiolab.org.

JAD: Our email address is radiolab@wnyc.org. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[STEVE JONES: Radiolab is produced by Lulu Miller and Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Soren Wheeler, Jonathan Mitchell, Ellen Horne, Amanda Aronczyk, Jessica Benko, and Elizabeth Giddon. With help from Anna Boiko-Weyrauch, Ike Sriskandarajah, and C Chung Lin. And original music from Jonathan Mitchell. Special thanks to Whitney Thompson and her students at Brooklyn Friends. Bye bye.]

 

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