Photo Nadezhda Moryak from Pexels
In this article, I will write about the human seed or the sperm.
As a male embryologist, I still am quite fascinated by human development particularly the sperm. I have worked as an embryologist for about 20 year's and I still am very fascinated with human fertilization and how we can become a fully working humans from those two small tiny cells that you can't see without a microscope. Even though the egg cell, or oocyte, is the largest cell in a human.
That those two cells can find each other and end up in a human being. Isn't that magic and fantastic!
Then grow to a baby, that grows to an adult human and lives for perhaps 80 years.
This article is about the male part of the child factory. That's because I am a man and the only thing I contribute with is one sperm and the only thing I can be proud of. The female does the hard work, carrying the baby for 9 months and then giving birth to the baby. That's really hard work.
But the sperm decides if it should be a woman or a man. That can we men be excited about. Ok, we can't even decide that, it is nature who decides, we do nothing.
We just deliver.
We provide about 75 million sperm per ejaculation normally, about 30% of them have progressive motility.
It is about 23 million.
One of those, ONE of those, reaches the egg.
So you and I are about one out of about 23 million sperms. From a universe of spermstars, are you and I born. Isn't that amazing?
What a small chance that you are you and I am I. That's a huge reason to take care of your life. And not spoil it.
Suddenly you are my age and wonder where the f… did it go. Be careful what you do with your time on Earth.
I started my career about 1990 working with the famous photographer Lennart Nilsson, who made the book A Child Is Born, and I didn't know much about human embryo development, but I thought it was incredibly fascinating, so after my 10 years with Lennart, I decided to become an embryologist and work with IVF.
The best decision I ever done. But that is another story.
Back to sperm.
The sperm cell is relatively stable. It swims a bit slower when the temperature falls a couple of degrees but it does not affect the sperm much. The seminal fluid is more toxic for the sperm, there is a lot of free radicals that affect the sperm. But if the seminal liquid is washed off and the sperm is in a buffer with glucose it can live and swim for many days even in room temperature. As long as they have glucose.
A small Swedish study says that if men eat food with sugar, not candy, more like fruit and other things with natural sugar, they produce more motile sperms. But it is a small study and I'll wait to believe that fully when I see a larger study.
Sperm production goes down if you have a high fever, or wear warm tight clothes around the scrotum. A rumor says that cab drivers, heavily bicycling, cooking near hot areas for a long time will impact the sperm quality, but not the sauna.
:-) there would not be any Finnish people if that was a fact.
A theory, due to all the chemicals for fertilization of plants, have the sperm quality and quantity decreased, in general, a bit in the population. It is not a huge problem yet but it is a fact that sperm quantity decreases.
Another aspect of decreasing sperm quality is a lifestyle. Much Netflix or gaming with a laptop in your knees, training too much, overdoing it isn't good.
Training in common is very important but overdoing it, like training, 2 to 3 times a day is not so promising for sperm quality, perhaps for your six-pack, not for your small friends.
High stressful life isn't good either, but it is not good for anything in life.
Or steroids.
A "normal" healthy lifestyle is enough.
In an IVF clinic, we wash away the seminal fluid and dead, bad sperm and have only motile sperm left before we fertilize the egg. That maximizes the fertilization rate. And makes it easier for the sperm to reach the egg.
There are two ways to assist fertilization, put about 100 000 sperm in a dish with eggs and let nature do the work.
Which is the best.
But sometimes, when nature doesn't work as we want, then we have to help nature.
We do ICSI (intracytoplasmatic sperm injection) and help one sperm into one egg with a tiny glass needle not much larger than the sperm in diameter.
But that is a little risk because you can harm the egg, a skilled embryologist does avoid that.
That is incredible and, someone who couldn't have a baby the ordinary way can get some help and become a parent.
Sometimes the happy parents bring the baby to the clinic to show us.
That's even more amazing, to see the result of one egg and one sperm, and I have perhaps carried it in the dish, in the lab.
In a further article, I will maybe write about the oocyte if someone is interested.
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