Newsweek: 'Mapping the God of Sperm'

[denem]

Every sperm is sacred, Every sperm is great. If a sperm gets wasted, God get's quite irate.

Not a problem actually, the God of Sperm in the USA is the Dollar.


Kirk Maxey with two of his known donor offspring: Caitlyn and Ashley Swetland.

MAPPING THE GOD OF SPERM

One of the Midwest's most prolific sperm donors may hold the key to understanding how genes affect our health.

It's a crisp fall day in Northville, Mich., a small suburb of Ann Arbor, and Kirk Maxey, a soft-spoken, graying baby boomer with a classic square jaw, is watching his 12-year-old son chase a soccer ball toward the goal. Maxey is doing what he does every Saturday, along with hundreds of other family men and women across the country, but he's not your average soccer dad. Maxey, 51, happens to be one of the most prolific sperm donors in the country. Between 1980 and 1994, he donated at a Michigan clinic twice a week. He's looked at the records of his donations, multiplied by the number of individual vials each donation produced, and estimated the success of each vial resulting in a pregnancy. By his own calculations, he concluded that he is the biological father of nearly 400 children, spread across the state and possibly the country...

But now a fierce conscience is catching with his robust procreative drive. When he's not running his company, Maxey has become a devoted advocate for better government regulation of the sperm-donor business. He is also making his genome public through Harvard's Personal Genome Project, and hopes that the information collected there might one day help his offspring and their mothers. "I think it was quite reckless that sperm banks created so many offspring without keeping track of their or my health status," he says. "Since there could be (many families) that could have to know information about my health, this is my effort to correct the wrong."

Maxey began donating before sperm banking became the big visible business it is today, where single women and couples can purchase STD-free, Ivy League, celebrity-look-alike sperm that has been quarantined and meets FDA mandates. But, in the '70s and '80s, the business operated behind a veil of secrecy. A man could clandestinely make some extra cash by donating to an infertile couple, and more often than not the ob-gyn, not the prospective families, would choose the sperm (for example) his favorite tennis partner , perhaps, or in the case of Kirk Maxey, the handsome, blue-eyed, Nordic husband of his nurse...

"I had this 'Oh my God' moment, thinking, how many kids have been produced?" he says. "I thought the doctors were keeping track of each birth, but when I realized they weren't, I began to worry. What if they start dating one another?". He also began to worry about their genetic health. "I wanted to know if I have anything totally lethal or deranged or recessive in my genes that I may have passed along."http://www.newsweek.com/id/227104

Fortunately, Maxey's genome has turned up nothing shocking so far.

[Warpy]

1. Maxey needs to relax, none of us was born with a good guarantee

I know my own parents shuddered as they realized all the family diseases they could have passed on and all the ones they did. Disease is the condition of human life and none of us is going to get through it without one or more of them.

Maxey helped a lot of women who desperately wanted children to have them. Now he's being generous again, with the most intimate information a human being can provide.

He can be proud of that.

Nobody has a perfect genetic pedigree, after all.

[denem]

2. Maxey is advocating stricter government regulation.

I agree with him: Health and ethics, not dollars, first.

[tonysam]

3. It boggles the mind what could happen with lax regulations. n/t

[denem]

4. Flaccid regulations?

... sorry, couldn't resist?

But yes, a collection of compromised sperm could be used to target innocent people.

[tonysam]

5. LOL n/t

[ThomWV]

6. Who said there are no ethical men?

This guy figured it out, it took him a while, but he did and then he did the right thing. I wish I were that perceptive.

[denem]

9. Maxey is a CEO - after medical school, he didn't need the money.

[rug]

7. What a jerkoff.

[denem]

12. Well, it's a little 'relief' from the Health Care flamers (on both sides)

[Matariki]

8. What's with the subject line? It seems sarcastic and mean.

It's an interesting story and the guy interviewed seems decent.

[denem]

10. It's the NewsWeek Title. I'll put it in quotes.

[VanW]

11. 400 children, many in the same state

At least a few will probably end up dating and having sex with each other. Ever heard of Genetic Sexual Attraction?

Oh, the wonders of biotechnology.

[Berry Cool]

13. Yeah, my greater concern would be, how many half-brothers and half-sisters will fall in love

with each other, decide to marry and have kids, not realizing their close blood kinship?

And what if some of them get together and fall in love and only then discover themselves to share the same father?

I have always worried about this possible consequence of guys becoming frequent sperm donors with no records being kept of their identity so that the children they produce will know who their genetic father is if they need to--not just the inherited disease factor.

I don't think most people want to inadvertently marry their half-brother or half-sister.