Air-dried sperm and possible pregnancy

Anonymous
asks:
I wanted to share an article I had read with you. I am unable to understand it to the fullest of my ability, some of it confuses me hence I feel if you read it you would be able to make sense of it better. I recently read an article titled " Air-dried sperms fertilize egg ". This article concerns IVF but there is other information I am a little confused about. I am sure other teenagers have read the same article and some of the information is hard for us to understand because its all medical stuff. If you google the title, the article in many different websites will appear. The abc forum has some comments below which better explain the concept I think.. or confuse you further. The article basically states that air dried sperm do not die... and infact the head of the sperm is filled with DNA which can still fertilize an egg. Though from what I have read and understand is that even though the sperm is dried out, it needs to be rehydrated properly and then has to directly be injected into the egg. It says nothing about air dried sperm automatically fertilizing anything on its own. As in I think even though the sperm is not dead, it can't swim. But the head of it can still fertilize. So it's not dead. I still understand very little of this article, and was hoping if someone from scarleteen read it, would understand it better and then maybe can better explain it to me. Maybe you could post an article of your own on your website about it? Since it has some new information etc. I am not sure whether it is new information... I think it's new information to me rather. But I felt that most information does state, dried sperm is dead sperm. But this article says otherwise. I am also posting a link : http://www2b.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/archives/archive56/newposts/573/topic573436.shtm There are other articles, but this one has a forum which talks about it. The comments might help. Please do read it and tell me what you think.
David replies:

Hi Tamika,

I'm not a fertility specialist but I am able to read the papers you're referring to. And here's the deal:

1) It doesn't look like it's possible to accidentally get pregnant from dried sperm.
2) You *can* use dried sperm to fertilize an egg, but not an egg inside the body. You'd need pretty sophisticated lab equipment.

Whether that makes the dried sperm dead or alive is kind of tricky. I'm going to say that the sperm cell itself is dead in the sense it's organized cellular activity has stopped for good. *But* in another sense, even though the cell is dead if the DNA packet is undamaged (and DNA is chemically very durable) then it's possible to recover it from the dead cell and insert it into an egg that's ready to be fertilized.

But again that's not going to happen by accident.

Good question,

David

More like This