CGS-authored
"These sperm are hot to trot and there are a lot," says Dr. Glenn Zorn as he peers into the microscope. He can see them swimming frenetically in small grids.
That is good news for the specimen's owner, who came to Zorn's Berkeley lab one spring day to improve the chances of getting what he and his wife want: a boy baby. They already have a girl. And now, in a practice widely known as family balancing, they are paying for technology that can tilt the gender statistics in their favor.
Zorn, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and comfortable sandals, will spend about three hours cleaning, spinning and layering the sperm in test tubes to separate those carrying X chromosomes -- which produce girls -- from ones with Y chromosomes -- which make boys. It's not a sure thing even then. The process increases the odds by as much as 80 percent that the baby, if there is a pregnancy, will be male. Or, when combined with fertility drugs, it can increase the chances of having a girl to about...
That is good news for the specimen's owner, who came to Zorn's Berkeley lab one spring day to improve the chances of getting what he and his wife want: a boy baby. They already have a girl. And now, in a practice widely known as family balancing, they are paying for technology that can tilt the gender statistics in their favor.
Zorn, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and comfortable sandals, will spend about three hours cleaning, spinning and layering the sperm in test tubes to separate those carrying X chromosomes -- which produce girls -- from ones with Y chromosomes -- which make boys. It's not a sure thing even then. The process increases the odds by as much as 80 percent that the baby, if there is a pregnancy, will be male. Or, when combined with fertility drugs, it can increase the chances of having a girl to about...