ABLE-BODIED SEMEN AND THE WOMEN OF SCIENCE

By Peter Kurth (Forbes “FYI,” March 1995)

My sister came home for the holidays this year with news of fresh advances in the war against sperm.

I'm talking about sperm, those little squiggly things inside your testicles -- I suppose I ought to say "one's" testicles, since I can't be sure who's reading this. I suppose I ought to say bijoux de famille, for that matter, since it might be my mother, who covers her ears whenever my sister talks about her work and whimpers, "Please! There are things a mother has a right not to know!"

*

A word of caution: there will be no attempts at euphemism in this story, a mother's rights notwithstanding. The war against sperm will not be won by the faint of heart.

*

The fact is my sister is an expert on testicles. She's a testicle collector. It's her business. She hunts them down. She's on testicle detail. She has a beeper and a bucket of ice.

"You'd be surprised how reluctant most men are to give theirs up," she says casually.

I'm not, but how do you answer a remark like that?

"No, no," my sister protests, "even if their lives depend on it." She has always been cool as a cucumber -- oh, Lord, there I go ....

*

A plea for understanding: this is hard ... uh, that is, difficult ... to pull off ... to write about, I mean.

*

My sister's a scientist, okay? She has a Ph.D. in cellular -- or molecular, or testicular -- biology. We have assimilated this fact only slowly in my family, ever amazed at Barbara's stupendous transformation from a coat-check girl in Boston to a dedicated researcher engaged in the fight against overpopulation -- the scourge of our time, Barbara says, the single most important problem facing humanity, and the cause to which she has now dedicated her life.

"Can you think of another dilemma more crucial than this?" she asks. "Can you name any problem that can't be traced back eventually to the overcrowding of the planet?"

There are my finances, of course, but I guess my sister has a point: Merrill Lynch can only accommodate so many deadbeats at a time. Even AIDS, my sister thinks, is just a manifestation of the larger problem, nature's little balancing act, an effort on the part of the microbes to reduce the global burden in the only way that microbes know: savagely, directly, and without regard to sentiment.

"Microbes are real, you see," my sister explains. "They're sentient. We all run around worrying about our `lives' and our `goals,' but the cells are where it's at." She worked in sweat glands before moving over to testosterone -- it had something to do with a potential treatment for cystic fibrosis -- peeling the skins off abandoned corpses at a police morgue in South Carolina and looking for signs of ... who knows what?

My sister's mission in life is to reduce the suffering as best she can, to educate, advise and plead with anyone who's smart enough to listen: "We are in a crisis. Nothing has changed. We are doomed if we do not take action." The lion's share of contraceptive research is still focused on preventing conception "in the womb," Barbara explains. It's the Pill and IUDS and an ever-changing series of "morning-after" medicines, and it places the onus of population control squarely on the shoulders of women.

What about vasectomies? I ask.

"Reversible," Barbara snaps, "in a large number of cases. And most men won't have them until they've already had children." I realize suddenly that I'm up against a contraceptive Carry Nation. She and the rest of a 20-member staff at a major university outside Washington are looking for new and innovative ways to "stop conception where it starts," as Barbara says -- "in the penis."

That's what they need the testicles for: research. Hormones. Your ultimate good. They need them "fresh," too, you'll want to know, and whenever a pair comes up for grabs anywhere within a 500-mile radius of Washington, my sister gets busy. She also has some further kind of use for "the urine of post-menopausal women who have never had sex with men," but I can't tell you what. It sounds to me like the quest for the broom of the Witch of the West.

"What do you do?" I ask her. "Stand outside the convent wall and wait for the slops?"

"We'd never find what we're looking for in a convent," my sister replies. "What we need are fewer political lesbians and more actual ones. We need some women who really mean it."

You have to understand that my sister has mixed feelings about the world of science, calling it "murderously territorial and competitive" and a "scourge" in its own right. But she so believes in what she's doing that she's prepared to overlook it. She had better overlook it, she says, since there aren't too many women in her lab -- only two -- and if the last several centuries are anything to go by, leaving men in charge of health and reproductive services bodes distinctly ill for the future. My sister's attitude to science is coincident with an old remark of Germaine Greer's, namely, that if there were more women in science we might become lousy at going to the moon but "we'd be awfully good at curing cholera and things like that."

"All propaganda to the contrary," Barbara explains, "science is a male institution. It’s XY from top to tail." It's driven by ego more than by altruism, she thinks, and it has no real use for women apart from their experimental and mop-up value. For every Marie Sklodowska (that is, Curie) who comes down the pike, for every genetics genius like Barbara McClintock or Mary Claire King, there are 30 or 40 maids-of-all-work: chart maintainers, test-tube swishers, gofers, nurses, receptionists, staff. The Nobel could never be won without them, but they have a way of disappearing, of fading into the woodwork, whenever the Scientist -- the Doctor, the Great Man himself -- proceeds in state to the patient's bed, trailed by his dozens of reverential students, taps his forehead, snaps his fingers and says, "Excellent. See you tomorrow," before rushing off to dinner or to collect his prize. The women of science are the unsung heroes of research and medicine, though most of them, unlike my sister, haven't made testicles their personal target.

As children, none of us could have guessed where Barbara might end up, or how. We're a various bunch, completely American and with no professional or dynastic pedigree. Barbara was always an anomaly, "vague," we said, "the gray sheep" of the family, quiet and unassuming and just biding her time until she reached 18 and could leave the house. My mother's only directive to her daughters when it came to their careers was that they never, never learn how to type. Knowing how to type had ruined her life, she said. She's a graduate of Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School in New York City, one of those war-time gals who waited for their boyfriends beneath the clock at the Biltmore and got married as soon as she'd typed the final "a ...s ...d ...f ...j ...k ...l ...semi" on her Gibbs exam.

"Don't do what I did," she pleaded with my sisters. "Learn a task. Become a prostitute. Anything but shorthand!"

So Barbara couldn't type, but she could waitress, and she did, for several years until she married. Her five-year union with a Boston thug (and there's no worse kind) left her with a diagnosis of narcolepsy and depression. A divorce, a breakdown, and a long, long rest ultimately led to "night courses" at a women's college run by nuns and the sudden discovery -- like Helen Keller at the water-well -- that she was gifted with a scientific brain, a facility for numbers, codes and formulas, and a tolerance for the indecipherable claptrap of "the experts" equaled only by her patience as a child in eating anything my mother served for dinner. We used to say that Barbara had a mouth lined with cellophane. We had no idea that her docility was actually shrewdness, and that her life to the age of 30 was only a preparation for her retributive leap, scissors in hand, into the world of the duct and the glands. She is adamant when she says that women must no longer carry the burden of contraception by themselves; that men must learn that they are "co-responsible -- ha ha!" for the ruin of the planet.

"There are good reasons, as it happens, for a man to surrender his testicles," Barbara says.

Such as?

"Well, treatment for cancer, for one. Prostate cancer. Testicular cancer. But you ought to hear their shrieks and screams! They'd rather die, literally, than lose their ... things." She's a bit squeamish still, but only in the vernacular.

"Here are millions of women undergoing mastectomies and hysterectomies and clitoridectomies all over the world every day," Barbara says, "but touch a man's private parts ...."

She pauses to collect herself: "It's the same kind of misplaced ego you find in all those yuppie parents looking for `surrogate mothers' to bear their children -- this idea that a child is only worth having and raising if it's yours, if it's got your genetic code, or some of it, anyway. It's this idea in America that infertility is a tragedy rather than a personal disappointment. Believe me, the world is in no great need of my, or your, or anybody's child in particular."

There's a sad story at the back of my sister's words that I hesitate to reveal, realizing that it colors her determination with a bitter hue and might even be used against her should she take her point too far. I wasn't sure if I ought to mention it in a column that strives to be lighthearted, but I asked her if she'd mind and she said no, so long as I didn't talk about the monkeys at the lab (so I won't). After her divorce, during a bitter custody battle involving threats, intimidation, psychiatrists and wads of cash, the Thug walked off with their two children -- vanished into thin air, as a matter of fact, never to be seen again. Any of them. This was years ago, and I wouldn't deny that the abduction of her daughters might have its own bearing on my sister's chosen career. We don't ask her about it. I only want to say that her adjustment to this (very real) tragedy has not been cosmetic. She has "come to terms with it," as the saying is. She's married again, happily, and apart from a certain nervous way of smoking -- which she only does, I hasten to add, when she is nervous -- and the occasional far-off look, you'd never know how severely her life had been blighted.

*

So what's new in the war? I ask her over a plate of my mother's Christmas cookies. How can we get men to take more responsibility for the ultimate destination of those impish cells? According to a recent article in The Washington Post, the field of contraceptive research is in "full retreat," strapped for funds, of no concern to affluent women, and facing an increasingly vocal right-wing backlash that equates contraception with abortion and the murder of "babies." It's a philosophy, backward and stupid, that wants women to "protect themselves" by themselves, while conspiring to deprive them (the poor ones, anyway, in vast numbers around the world) of the means to do it. Not surprisingly, America's pharmaceutical giants are "wary of [the] negative political climate," according to the Post: "Embroilment with the abortion issue is seen as a potential threat to corporate image and sales of other products," and only one company (Ortho Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson) has carried on with the fight: in 1960, the Post reports, there were 13 companies working on the problem.

"It's better in Europe," my sister sighs, "and in Asia, but not a lot." She hands me a folder of press clippings that seem to have come straight from the imagination of Stanley Kubrick or the Marquis de Sade. A new type of condom has apparently been patented with a hidden microchip that rings a bell if it falls off during coitus (the scientists' preferred word for you-know-what). Someone in Germany has recently taken this novelty a step further and hopes to market a line of rubbers that play Beethoven and Mozart in perilous situations. Serums, vaccines and a variety of implants are all being tested, including one small device, "the size of a peppercorn," that fits inside the scrotum and electrocutes sperm at the moment of ejaculation.

"Critics of the implant warn that interactions with electric blankets, portable telephones or stereos should be examined," says the clip I have, and I don't doubt they're right to worry. In England, Proteus International has been looking at a sperm-killing chemical, already used on animals, that might eventually prove effective as a pill -- the "Pill" -- for men. "It also shrinks the testicles," insiders reveal, "but arguably it is better to have shrunken testicles than no testicles at all."

Just ask my sister. Last July, the director of her project called his staff together -- two women, remember, and 18 men -- to request that they "tighten their belts." These were his very words. With the students away for the summer, he said, there was "a sperm shortage" at the lab; normally the young men on campus get $15 or $20 a pop to produce the goods in a test tube.

My sister's mouth dropped open. "A sperm shortage!" she exclaimed, while 18 men stared back at her, and her lone female colleague sat anxiously by her side.

"A sperm shortage?" she said again. "Well, what's the matter with all of you?" She had never seen so many scandalized faces at one table, she told me later, not even when we were kids and she was the only one who would eat the salmon croquettes without a fuss. I offer this column as a tribute to her work and in memory of those days, when we all thought she was "passive" but in fact she was thinking of the future.