Health

The Booby Traps Posed by the Sperm Banks

Would you like a genetic disorder for your kid?

By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor

11th of August 2007, 09:11 GMT

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You can imagine the expectations of a woman who appeals to a bank sperm: the father must be tall, muscular, wide shouldered, with nice a*s, and a big penis. And when the creature they give birth to after nine months of pregnancy looks like ET and has some rare mutation or genetic disorder...

A novel New Scientist's report shows that even if sperm banks carefully screen their donors, the protocols for protecting donors lead to disturbing errors.

The about 20 sperm banks in the U.S.

effectuate limited DNA analysis on their donors, and check medical histories for three generations, drug use and psychological issues.

But perhaps of more interest is what sperm banks DO NOT perform such investigations, as they are not obliged by law to do this. They don't check if the whole medical or personal information offered by the donors is correct, and testing for most known genetic disorders is not a routine. A woman does not receive the confirmation that the sperm that will help conceive her child is what she had requested. The banks don't monitor the donors' whereabouts or the offspring's state. All these details that are neglected make possible the emergence of some severe errors.

In January, the Donor Semen Archive (DSA), a nonprofit arm of biotech company Cayman Chemical Co., has been launched with the aim to detect these errors. DSA makes analyses of DNA samples from donors' offspring, their frozen semen samples, used semen vials, and even the donors themselves to determine the donors' health and identity.

In one case, DSA showed that two people whose records stated they had the same father in fact were the result of sperm coming from two different donor-fathers. But the DSA's main goal is to detect a donor's genetic disorders before these issues are inherited by other children.

In 2006, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, four mothers discovered their children inherited the same uncommon genetic disorder. The sperm bank was not able to track down the donor of the culprit sperm and they could not say how many children were fathered by the same man or if he was still "working" with the bank.

"The registry would have uncovered the cause of the disease earlier and been able to quickly ward other parents away from the donor's sperm." said DSA's director, Kirk Maxey.

Some researchers and bioethicists say that the DSA is encroaching the medical principle of informed consent; donors work with the sperm banks just for offering sperm used in conception, not for DNA analysis. "The kind of error the DSA seeks out occurs very rarely amid the roughly 50,000 donor inseminations that happen each year in the U.S." said Charles Sims, founder of California Cryobank.

TAGS:

sperm | bank | DNA

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