Читать книгу Hatches, Matches and Despatches - Jenny Paschall - Страница 7

ALL the female eggs needed to produce the next generation of the human race can be contained within the shell of one chicken’s egg.

IN 1982 Lee Perry, a female Harvard university professor, sued Dr Richard Atkinson, chancellor of the University of California at San Diego, because he refused to make her pregnant. She volunteered to abandon the case in exchange for Dr Atkinson’s sperm.

ACCORDING to research in Norway, eggs are an aphrodisiac. In a study of men with low libidos, it was found that eighty-four per cent felt an increase in sexual desire after being treated with an extract from fertilized chickens’ eggs. Soft lights, music, wine and … scrambled eggs? We’ll stick with oysters!

WHEN a 5,000-year-old man was found preserved in ice in the Alps, researchers at Austria’s Innsbruck University were inundated with calls from women who wanted to be artificially inseminated with the sperm of the original Mr Cool.

IN 1863, during the United States Civil War, a woman was artificially inseminated by a bullet. While watching a battle from her front porch, with her mother and sister, this young lady was wounded in the abdomen by a stray bullet, which had already hit a soldier in his scrotum.

Both the soldier and the girl recovered. Nine months later, the girl delivered a baby boy, who closely resembled the young soldier. The surgeon who treated them both, Captain L. G. Capers, hypothesized that the bullet that struck the soldier carried the sperm into the young woman’s uterus, thereby causing her to conceive. Following this discovery, the soldier and the young woman were formally introduced, fell in love and married. They had two more children, using less dramatic methods of conception.

ANOTHER unusual long-distance conception occurred in Sydney, Australia in 1969, when a fifteen-year-old school-girl claimed she had become pregnant after swimming in a public pool. Doctors confirmed the pregnant girl was a virgin, and the courts ruled that she had been impregnated by sperm in the swimming pool water.

ACCORDING to the World Health Organization, the sex act takes place at least 100 million times a day. This figure was computed by multiplying the world birth rate by the accepted estimate of the number of times sex does not result in conception.

THE largest cell in the human body is the female ovum, and the smallest is the male sperm. One egg cell weighs the same as 175,000 sperm.