JAD ABUMRAD: Hello, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: 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, hello. I'm a professor of genetics at University College, London.

JAD: He wrote a book called Y: The Descent of Men, 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: Well, 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: Let's imagine that 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 ...

STEVE JONES: 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: Parasites?

ROBERT: Yeah. 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 court 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 and haven't 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 MILLER: 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, there's somebody buzzing on the doorbell now. That's now stopped. Hang on, we got another bloody nuclear explosion going on outside here. Jesus Christ, it's normally quiet as the grave in here. Okay, all right. True, 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 ...

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.

[NEWS 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?"

[NEWS 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.

[NEWS 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.

[NEWS CLIP: Schlegel says Mrs. Baez would have an excellent chance of conceiving with the sperm he retrieved if that's what she decides 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 kit.

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 would 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—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's 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 Giddens. 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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