THE wild frontier of reproductive technology has just got wilder. Last week,
for the first time, sperm taken from a dead man resulted in a human birth.
Meanwhile, an Italian IVF specialist claims to have produced four babies using
sperm grown in the testes of rodents.
Gaby Vernoff, whose husband Bruce died from a reaction to a prescription
medicine in 1995, gave birth last week to a baby girl in a Los Angeles
hospital.
About 30 hours after Bruce Vernoff鈥檚 death, Cappy Rothman of Century City
Hospital in Los Angeles extracted sperm from the body at the family鈥檚 request.
Rothman has supervised this procedure more than a dozen times. 鈥淩etrieving
something from their loved one gives families in grief some hope,鈥� he says. The
Vernoffs were the first to use the sperm for fertilisation, however. Single
thawed sperm were injected into Gaby Vernoff鈥檚 eggs. After one unsuccessful
attempt, she become pregnant last year
(This Week, 18 July 1998, p 5).
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British law requires written consent from a man for his sperm to be used
after his death. But there is no such requirement in the US, leading to concerns
that sperm could be 鈥渟tolen鈥� from a man who had no intention of reproducing.
This has inspired a bill placed before the New York state legislature by Roy
Goodman, a Republican state senator. It requires prior written consent for a
man鈥檚 sperm to be retrieved after death. The request must come from a wife or
partner. But the bill has languished in committee for more than a year. 鈥淣othing
has focused people鈥檚 attention on the issue,鈥� says Kathy Lenhart, Goodman鈥檚
executive assistant. The Vernoff birth may provide that focus.
Gaby Vernoff did not have her husband鈥檚 written consent to take his sperm
after his death. However, Rothman says she does have a video in which her
husband expressed his desire to have children.
While the arguments about posthumous reproduction centre on consent, concerns
about safety have been raised by the latest announcement from Severino Antinori
of the International Associated Research Institute for Human Reproduction in
Rome.
Antinori attracted controversy previously when he used IVF to allow a
62-year-old woman to become a mother. Now he claims to have turned sterile men
into fathers by maturing their sperm inside the testes of rodents. At a
conference in Venice last week, he claimed the technique had already resulted in
four babies鈥攖he oldest of which is now eight months old.
Antinori reportedly collaborated with Nikolaos Sofikitis of Tottori
University in Yonago, Japan, who last month announced that he had grown human
sperm in mice and rats
(This Week, 13 February, p 4).
Antinori could not be reached for comment, and many biologists are sceptical
of his claims. But if they are true, he risks the opprobrium of reproductive
specialists who argue that animal tests to show sperm develop normally if grown
in another species should have been completed first. 鈥淵ou still need to do the
safety checks,鈥� says Mark Johnson of Imperial College, London.