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Sperm Sorting Chip
Makarand writes "Microscopically narrow fluid streams running side by side barely mix - a phenomenon
put to use in a
new stamp size silicon chip for purifying sperm. This
technique could
find use in infertility clinics where centrifugal technqiues, which
can damage fragile sperm, are currently used to purify sperm. Semen and salt water
are dripped into etched lanes less than half a millimeter wide from opposite ends of the chip. When the lanes merge, the healthy and wriggly sperm swim into the salt water stream
and leave the dead and the disabled sperm behind."
I would like to request at this point, for the good of the community, that no one post any jokes on this thread.
This technique could find use in infertility clinics where centrifugal technqiues, which can damage fragile sperm...
If centrifugal techniques can damage sperm cells, just imagine what a centrifuge will do to the rest of the guy undergoing the treatment! You'll never get me into one of those deathtraps!
How does it perform against Mergesort or Quicksort?
You are naturally unable to fly, does that mean one should never take an airplane anywhere?
Adoption is a good thing, I was adopted myself, but thats a personal decision, adoption isn't for everyone. My dad had an accident, and his brain swelled, crushing a part of his brain responsible for regulating hormones, therefore rendering him unable to father children- does that mean he shouldn't have kids? You say that if nature doesn't want you to have kids, you should adopt a kid? Makes no sense...
Would it be fair to say that this is "seminal research"?
Ron Paul 2012
It really doesn't matter what value you place on human life, nor if you are a believer in "God's Grand Design" or a steadfast evolutionist or anything in between... Nature is nature.
If you can't have children because you are naturally unable to, then maybe you're not supposed to have kids at all.
There you go, the fatal flaw in this reasonning is when you used the word "supposed". As if there was an intention behind someone's low sperm count, as if a concious choice was made at some point by an intellectual entity with power over your sperm count.
This is not how natural selection works. Natural selection works thusly: If you have descendents, you suceeded. And the word "natural" doesn't mean "if you have children that you would also have had had you been stranded without any technology on a remote desert island".
Using a device to filter out your lil' swimmers is no different, in the grand scheme of things, from using a spear to kill an antilope. Its using your naturally selected brain to come up with a plan to make sure you live another day and have kids that'll do the same, day after day.
Remeber, its not how you reproduce, its if you reproduce.
If you want a kid and are unable to have one "the natural way", why not consider adoption?
Selfishness. They don't want "a" kid, they want "their" kid. They want a version 2.0 of themselves.
You can't take the sky from me...