Sperm Test » sperm bank

BeautifulPeople.com launches controversial virtual sperm bank

Healthy Living — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 12:16:02 +0000

New York, Jun 23 (THAINDIAN NEWS) BeautifulPeople.com has launched a controversial virtual sperm bank. According to Sky News, they have launched the egg and sperm bank for people who want beautiful children.

BeautifulPeople.com has always opened its doors and membership to people who are beautiful. However they have been deluged with demands for the sperm and eggs of the pretty people, so they had no option but to give in to popular demand and create a virtual egg and sperm bank. However they are facing a lot of ridicule and criticism from a number of quarters for this step.

The founder of the website Robert Hintze said that, “Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people. But everyone — including ugly people — would like to bring good looking children into the world, and we can’t be selfish with our attractive gene pool.”

The owners of the website also added that they think that every parent would want to have a pretty child, if they had the choice, hence they implemented the idea. However the idea is not without its critics. Dr. David King who belongs to the watchdog group Human Genetics Alert says that this idea is “dangerous for our society.”

Via: thaindian.com

Want A Celebrity Look Alike Baby?

Healthy Living — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 12:24:59 +0000

CNN — First came naming babies after movie stars. Then there were copycats of celebrity outfits, Academy Award dresses and even nose jobs. Now, the celebrity chase is getting genetic.

A Los Angeles, California, sperm bank links to photos of celebrities who resemble existing donors in a Web feature called Donor Look-a-Likes. This attempts to give clients an idea of what the anonymous sperm donors look like.

Donor Look-a-Likes helps answer the would-be clients’ most frequently asked question about their donors, which is who do they look like, said California Cryobank’s communications manager, Scott Brown.

The site offers a search function with donors who sperm bank staff believe resemble actors such as Aaron Eckhart, Jake Gyllenhaal, Errol Flynn and a “young” Russell Crowe (versus the current Russell Crowe, who is 45). Donor Look-a-Likes are not limited to thespians — the sperm bank’s vast Web search includes Tom Brokaw, Tiger Woods, Stephen Colbert, Lance Bass and Adam Carolla.

California Cryobank’s employees spent months sifting through the existing donor list, subjectively matching them with celebrities. A sperm donor may have a chin, eyes or some physical similarity to stars and was given two to three celebrities he resembled. The sperm bank does not charge more for specimens from a celebrity look-alike, Brown said.

The cryobank accepts less than 1 percent of the donor applicants, who go through extensive screenings that include genetic testing, blood tests, a three-generation family medical history and a sperm count.

According to the Web site: “No celebrity is meant as an exact match for any donor, nor should you assume that your future children will look like any celebrity listed.” Forty percent of the sperm bank’s clients are heterosexual couples with infertility issues and 60 percent are single women or gay couples.

Selecting a sperm donor usually takes about four to six weeks for prospective parents. Since Donor Look-a-Likes launched two weeks ago, it’s unclear whether the feature has influenced decisions, Brown said.

The site does not contain photos, but instead links to Google images of celebrities. Ben Affleck has been the most searched celebrity since its launch.

Bioethicists are divided over the program. Sperm banks routinely allow clients to search based on ethnic background, hair color, eye color and skin tone. They offer extensive details such as donors’ height, weight and educational background.

Sperm banks do not need to identify celebrity resemblance to a male donor because it could create “unreasonable expectations” of the child, Rothstein said. “What would happen if the child [conceived from donated sperm] doesn’t look like a celebrity or that look-alike?” he asked. “Would the child be treated like a failure?”

An attractive man’s sperm does not guarantee that the offspring will look anything like him.

Brown said the database isn’t to give parents a way to give birth to mini-celebrity look-alikes.

Bonnie Steinbock, professor of philosophy who specializes in bioethics at the University at Albany in New York, said it magnifies the superficiality in society. “There’s something strange about a culture that has stratified rigid types of beauty where everyone looks alike. Now they’re trying to create children through who the [actor] of the moment is.”

Ronald Green, a professor for the Study of Ethics and Human Values and director of the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, found Donor Look-a-Likes “silly, but not ethically serious.”

Green said choosing sperm based on celebrity look-alikes may seem superficial, but so are other aspects of social interactions.

Via: cnn.com

Sperm and the Single Girl

Healthy Living — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:23:21 +0000

Michelle Mobilia, a clinical researcher in Boston, Massachusetts, was contemplating grad school when she saw an episode of Lipstick Jungle that changed her life. “A woman was freezing her eggs, and it hit me: I’m 37, and I want to have children.” Within three months, Mobilia had purchased eight vials of sperm from a bank, an experience she likens to “match.com, because you’re looking for qualities in someone you’d want to date. I used Google for everything.”

Even more surprising is how Mobilia ultimately chose her donor. He met her criteria regarding education and medical history, and he was an open-identity donor, which meant he was willing to be contacted by his sperm-bank offspring when they turned 18 — a fast-growing phenomenon that is putting a new, and human, face on donor insemination (DI). But the clincher for Mobilia was an hour-long audio interview she downloaded from the bank’s Website. “His voice sounded warm and kind,” Mobilia recalls. “I listened to stories about his family, friends, wife, and life experiences. He said he became a donor not for the financial incentive, but to give an amazing gift to an individual or a couple, which was great news after hearing so many guys say flat-out they were doing it for the money. A donor can make up to $100 per sample. It was really moving. During the last minute, I had tears rolling down my face, and I knew this was right for me.”

All these choices can be paralyzing for a strong-minded, selective woman with money to spend and few compromises to make. (Some coveted sperm even have wait lists.) But experts suggest tuning out the bells and whistles. “Instead of trying to have the perfect designer baby, look for a donor who, if you met him and introduced him to your family, they’d feel comfortable with,” says Dr. Charles Sims, medical director of California Cryobank. Mattes, of Single Mothers by Choice, recommends using this filter: “Is he someone I would have happily dated?” And on a practical note, “Has this person had successful pregnancies?” (Yup, that’s in the profiles, too.)

Once a woman finds her dream sperm, there’s still the lengthy insemination process (which can run about $2,500) to consider. And with all those logistics and bills to keep track of, it’s easy to forget that DI is a deeply emotional undertaking. “It’s a big leap of faith to take biological material from someone you don’t know and put it in your body to make a baby,” says Alice Ruby, executive director of the Sperm Bank of California, which was founded in 1982 and pioneered the concept of open-identity donations with its Identity-Release program, started in 1983.

Via: marieclaire.com

DNA Testing Makes Them Easy to Trace

Healthy Living — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:03:28 +0000

When Donor 3066 signed up with the California Cryobank, he offered some basic information about himself on a piece of paper: that he had a BA in theater; that his mother was a nurse and his father was in the Baseball Hall of Fame; that his birthday was Sept. 18, 1968. He made it clear that he didn’t want to be found by signing a waiver of anonymity.

The sperm bank protected his anonymity, just as it promised. But that did not mean he couldn’t be found. In an age of sophisticated genetic testing, the concept of anonymity is rapidly fading. With some clever sleuthing—tests that can track down ancestral origins, donor numbers, and bits of biographical information—parents and offspring can find out the donors. “With DNA testing and Google, there’s no such thing as anonymity anymore,” says Wendy Kramer, the founder of the Donor Sibling Registry. “Donors are choosing anonymity because they’re not educated,” adds Kramer. “If they were properly educated on the consequences, then many would choose not to donate.”

Some sperm banks are changing their policies for fear that anonymous donors might withdraw from the program and hurt their bottom line. Cryos International, a sperm bank based in Copenhagen, Denmark, that claims to be the largest bank in the world, has started to offer a new program that it’s dubbing “Invisible Donors.” It’s a system where donors can offer very few registered characteristics so they will be more difficult to track, and the bank keeps track of them by fingerprints instead of donor number.

Via: slate.com