Loki
02-17-2009, 04:29 PM
An article dating from 2007, but still relevant and interesting, especially since Bulgaria seems to be Vikingized by Danish sperm (http://jimmybulgaria.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/what-im-reading-14/).
How Danish sperm is conquering the world (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/features/article649651.ece)
The Vikings are coming. As sperm donations in Britain slow to a trickle, Denmark has become the sperm powerhouse of Europe
Will Pavia
They swim through bright white light, their bodies translucent, tinged with grey and blue. It’s like a crowded plaza down there: some are in a dreadful hurry, others nose about like lazy tourists, a few have stopped altogether. They are the still-warm spermatozoa of a tall, shaven-headed Dane who ejaculated not half an hour ago in a booth at Cryos International Sperm Bank in Arhus, a university town on the northeast coast of Jutland.
Henrietta Peterson leans back from the microscope. Most of the time she studies pigs at the University Hospital of Arhus but two days a week she comes here to count male sperm. Pigs and men, then. “You said it,” she says, carefully. “Not me.”
The count determines the sale price. A sample with five million wriggling sperm per millilitre will sell at €26.4 (£17) per 0.4ml straw. A sample containing 50 million per ml sells for €264 per straw. Sperm is more expensive than gold. Decanted into straws and chilled to minus 196C (-321F), the swimmers will be suspended in a 500litre tank of liquid nitrogen in one of the richest sperm vaults in the world. A year from now, perhaps ten, they will travel by sealed container to a foreign shore where the fastest will revive and swim again. And with this same miraculous, but increasingly common, journey Danish sperm engenders children all over the world.
In the same way that some nations have oil fields or bread mountains, Denmark boasts an ever-growing sperm lake. The vault at Cryos HQ holds around 75,000 straws. It is far too much sperm for a nation where only 65,000 children are born each year, so Denmark is a net exporter. The efforts of the men of Arhus, Odense and Copenhagen have helped to engender an estimated 12,000 children around the world, and each year “the Danish stuff” brings forth some 1,400 more.
An embarrassment of riches in Denmark has corresponded to a scarcity of donor sperm almost everywhere else. In Britain, as in Norway and Sweden, new regulations ending anonymity for sperm donors has decimated the ranks of men once willing to donate, while in April the arrival of the EU Tissue Directive is likely to make sperm banking a harder business to manage on a small scale. Cryos could yet emerge with something of a monopoly on the European market.
The London Bridge centre once supplied donor sperm to most UK fertility clinics. “We now just about meet our own needs,” says Professor Gedis Grudzinskas, medical director. Previously, up to 15 UK clinics relied on semen from Cryos, but such imports are now restricted. “We send our most urgent cases to clinics in Denmark,” says Grudzinskas.
Fertilitetsklinikken Trianglen, north of Copenhagen, is one of these. In the hallway there is a chandelier of sperm-shaped bulbs; on the walls are hundreds of photographs of blonde blue-eyed babies. IVF treatment in this place of candles, rugs and pine floors will cost about £4,000. There are no waiting lists.
West across the Kattegat to Arhus, and Dr Karsten Peterson shows me the Ciconia Private Hospital, another fertility temple of pine floors, rugs and candles. “This place used to be filled with Siemens,” he says. What? “Siemens, the electronic company, had its offices here.” He has already treated 20 British couples. “It’s all very recent, but many are e-mailing me. You can fly Ryanair from Stansted, and we have deals with hotels: fertility tourists get a discount.”
All the doctors I spoke to said that the glut of Danish donors was thanks to a “long tradition of donating” in Denmark, adding that a society where 6 per cent of births involve assisted reproduction technology is likely to be receptive to calls to donate sperm.
Jesper Johansen, 23, president of Copenhagen University Students’ Union, said it was because Danes received a thorough sexual education at primary school. Upon reaching adulthood, as part of national conscription, everyone gets a health check and the option of having their sperm tested. From there it is only a short jump to a donation regime. Then there is Denmark’s liberal attitude to pornography. “Is this your best seller?” I ask a newsagent in Copenhagen, holding up a porn magazine. No one bats an eyelid as the merits of Private and Pige Special are debated — both of which offer “de bedste babes”.
Meanwhile Ole Schou, founder of Cryos, thinks Denmark the perfect location for a sperm bank because “it’s a little country and your neighbour still means something. Eight per cent of Danes give blood,” he says, “and a lot of our sperm donors are also blood donors.” He can take some of the credit for Denmark’s successful donor system. It was while captaining the Danish hang-gliding team that he discovered he also had a talent for organising things. So he went to business school in Arhus, where one night he had a dream of sperm trapped in ice. At the city library he called up everything it had on the subject — he was no scientist, but he found the research papers on sperm compelling. He began examining his own under a microscope, apologising to his family when they found it in the freezer.
Schou brought a new level of efficiency to Danish sperm banking. Only donors with the highest quality sperm — around one applicant in ten — were accepted and Schou also imposed a “daughter test” — “if the interviewing doctor would not want an applicant’s sperm to be used on his daughter, the applicant should be rejected”.
Schou admits this test is highly subjective: it might be the suspicion that an applicant is not telling the truth, it could be just “a sense that this person is not acceptable. Say this guy is not working, he’s sitting, eating crisps in front of the TV all the day, mama and papa doing all the work — I don’t think we would accept him.”
He has faced criticism, but he feels this parental approach is necessary when selecting the biological fathers of thousands of future children. “I’m sure if you asked the couples using our sperm, they would appreciate that we do this,” he says.
By April 1991, Schou had a bank of suitable donor sperm cleared for use. A week after his first delivery to the Mermaid Clinic, the first pregnancy was reported, after two weeks there had been five, and word of the “Danish stuff” spread across Europe.
Cryos’s Arhus HQ is in a converted warehouse in the town centre. Behind a counter lab technicians wear jeans and T-shirts and trendy white coats. In the hall hangs a huge painting of orange sperm trapped in ice, a depiction by a donor of Schou’s dream.
“It’s important to get the right atmosphere,” says Schou. “It’s odd to go into a place to masturbate.” So convivial was the atmosphere in his bank that many donors began to confide in Schou. “They were students, often far from home, and this is a place outside of university where you might talk to people,” he says. “In Britain you go to a pub; in Denmark, you go to the sperm bank.”
There are two donor rooms. In one, above the bed, there is a poster of three windsurfers, cresting a wave, muscular limbs glowing. Opposite there is a photo of a naked woman, leaning against a whitewashed wall and staring through tangled black hair. “The thinking with the girl,” says Thomas Ebbesen, head laboratory technician, “is that she’s naked, which sometimes helps in this process, but she’s not indecent.” The selection of pornographic magazines and videos available all have, he says, the same quality.
“I started donating when I lived in Copenhagen,” says Khristian, 25. “The obvious reason was money. Then I figured I could help childless couples too. It’s strange to think I’m a dad but not a dad.” He is muscular, handsome, with blue-grey eyes. “I come here twice a week,” he says. “I don’t find it difficult, I have a good imagination. It’s becoming more like a job.” His girlfriend lives 200km away. When she visits he stops donating; when they part, “it’s back to the schedule”.
A tall, blond software engineer enters the waiting room. He started as a student four years ago. Now 29, he has made more than 100 donations. Others arrive and sit down. When asked why Danes are so eager to donate, one replies “we are a nation of wankers”, but the rest say that they do it for the money, and to help childless couples.
The same dual answer came back when Schou surveyed 200 of his donors. “Payment has to be above 100DK (£10),” he says. But when he raised the rates, he did not gain more donors, and when he later dropped the price, he did not lose any. So payment is only part of the equation.
New freezing technology means that more applicants are now accepted, but three Danes out of four are still rejected. Donors are paid according to quality and quantity: many earn £10 a go, a small minority can earn up to £50. Thomas Ebbesen says that most donors give about six straws a time, “but one guy’s able to produce huge amounts, up to 10.3ml a time. Some guys are dangerous”.
There are 250 of these dangerously fertile men on the donor books at Cryos. It is more donors than registered in the whole of Britain in 2004, a country with ten times the population, but the crucial difference is that these Danes are producing not just for a domestic market, but for an international one. In Britain one man’s donor sperm can be used to treat ten infertile couples; other countries impose similar limits to avoid accidental incest between children of the same donor, but if one’s sperm is travelling to more than 50 countries, one can legally engender several hundred children. A few years ago Schou discovered that his most prolific donor had 101 children: that tally may have risen.
A thousand years ago the world faced a similar invasion of Danish men, rampaging into foreign gene pools, but this time it is not a nation but a crack corps of 250, super-fertile troops. And they don’t wear Viking helmets.
Professor Gert Bruun-Petersen, 72, medical director at Cryos and a leading expert in genetics, says that the Danish characteristics now being spread include “a lot of blond hair and blue eyes, especially for the women”. He smiles. “But I like that. Don’t you?”
How Danish sperm is conquering the world (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/features/article649651.ece)
The Vikings are coming. As sperm donations in Britain slow to a trickle, Denmark has become the sperm powerhouse of Europe
Will Pavia
They swim through bright white light, their bodies translucent, tinged with grey and blue. It’s like a crowded plaza down there: some are in a dreadful hurry, others nose about like lazy tourists, a few have stopped altogether. They are the still-warm spermatozoa of a tall, shaven-headed Dane who ejaculated not half an hour ago in a booth at Cryos International Sperm Bank in Arhus, a university town on the northeast coast of Jutland.
Henrietta Peterson leans back from the microscope. Most of the time she studies pigs at the University Hospital of Arhus but two days a week she comes here to count male sperm. Pigs and men, then. “You said it,” she says, carefully. “Not me.”
The count determines the sale price. A sample with five million wriggling sperm per millilitre will sell at €26.4 (£17) per 0.4ml straw. A sample containing 50 million per ml sells for €264 per straw. Sperm is more expensive than gold. Decanted into straws and chilled to minus 196C (-321F), the swimmers will be suspended in a 500litre tank of liquid nitrogen in one of the richest sperm vaults in the world. A year from now, perhaps ten, they will travel by sealed container to a foreign shore where the fastest will revive and swim again. And with this same miraculous, but increasingly common, journey Danish sperm engenders children all over the world.
In the same way that some nations have oil fields or bread mountains, Denmark boasts an ever-growing sperm lake. The vault at Cryos HQ holds around 75,000 straws. It is far too much sperm for a nation where only 65,000 children are born each year, so Denmark is a net exporter. The efforts of the men of Arhus, Odense and Copenhagen have helped to engender an estimated 12,000 children around the world, and each year “the Danish stuff” brings forth some 1,400 more.
An embarrassment of riches in Denmark has corresponded to a scarcity of donor sperm almost everywhere else. In Britain, as in Norway and Sweden, new regulations ending anonymity for sperm donors has decimated the ranks of men once willing to donate, while in April the arrival of the EU Tissue Directive is likely to make sperm banking a harder business to manage on a small scale. Cryos could yet emerge with something of a monopoly on the European market.
The London Bridge centre once supplied donor sperm to most UK fertility clinics. “We now just about meet our own needs,” says Professor Gedis Grudzinskas, medical director. Previously, up to 15 UK clinics relied on semen from Cryos, but such imports are now restricted. “We send our most urgent cases to clinics in Denmark,” says Grudzinskas.
Fertilitetsklinikken Trianglen, north of Copenhagen, is one of these. In the hallway there is a chandelier of sperm-shaped bulbs; on the walls are hundreds of photographs of blonde blue-eyed babies. IVF treatment in this place of candles, rugs and pine floors will cost about £4,000. There are no waiting lists.
West across the Kattegat to Arhus, and Dr Karsten Peterson shows me the Ciconia Private Hospital, another fertility temple of pine floors, rugs and candles. “This place used to be filled with Siemens,” he says. What? “Siemens, the electronic company, had its offices here.” He has already treated 20 British couples. “It’s all very recent, but many are e-mailing me. You can fly Ryanair from Stansted, and we have deals with hotels: fertility tourists get a discount.”
All the doctors I spoke to said that the glut of Danish donors was thanks to a “long tradition of donating” in Denmark, adding that a society where 6 per cent of births involve assisted reproduction technology is likely to be receptive to calls to donate sperm.
Jesper Johansen, 23, president of Copenhagen University Students’ Union, said it was because Danes received a thorough sexual education at primary school. Upon reaching adulthood, as part of national conscription, everyone gets a health check and the option of having their sperm tested. From there it is only a short jump to a donation regime. Then there is Denmark’s liberal attitude to pornography. “Is this your best seller?” I ask a newsagent in Copenhagen, holding up a porn magazine. No one bats an eyelid as the merits of Private and Pige Special are debated — both of which offer “de bedste babes”.
Meanwhile Ole Schou, founder of Cryos, thinks Denmark the perfect location for a sperm bank because “it’s a little country and your neighbour still means something. Eight per cent of Danes give blood,” he says, “and a lot of our sperm donors are also blood donors.” He can take some of the credit for Denmark’s successful donor system. It was while captaining the Danish hang-gliding team that he discovered he also had a talent for organising things. So he went to business school in Arhus, where one night he had a dream of sperm trapped in ice. At the city library he called up everything it had on the subject — he was no scientist, but he found the research papers on sperm compelling. He began examining his own under a microscope, apologising to his family when they found it in the freezer.
Schou brought a new level of efficiency to Danish sperm banking. Only donors with the highest quality sperm — around one applicant in ten — were accepted and Schou also imposed a “daughter test” — “if the interviewing doctor would not want an applicant’s sperm to be used on his daughter, the applicant should be rejected”.
Schou admits this test is highly subjective: it might be the suspicion that an applicant is not telling the truth, it could be just “a sense that this person is not acceptable. Say this guy is not working, he’s sitting, eating crisps in front of the TV all the day, mama and papa doing all the work — I don’t think we would accept him.”
He has faced criticism, but he feels this parental approach is necessary when selecting the biological fathers of thousands of future children. “I’m sure if you asked the couples using our sperm, they would appreciate that we do this,” he says.
By April 1991, Schou had a bank of suitable donor sperm cleared for use. A week after his first delivery to the Mermaid Clinic, the first pregnancy was reported, after two weeks there had been five, and word of the “Danish stuff” spread across Europe.
Cryos’s Arhus HQ is in a converted warehouse in the town centre. Behind a counter lab technicians wear jeans and T-shirts and trendy white coats. In the hall hangs a huge painting of orange sperm trapped in ice, a depiction by a donor of Schou’s dream.
“It’s important to get the right atmosphere,” says Schou. “It’s odd to go into a place to masturbate.” So convivial was the atmosphere in his bank that many donors began to confide in Schou. “They were students, often far from home, and this is a place outside of university where you might talk to people,” he says. “In Britain you go to a pub; in Denmark, you go to the sperm bank.”
There are two donor rooms. In one, above the bed, there is a poster of three windsurfers, cresting a wave, muscular limbs glowing. Opposite there is a photo of a naked woman, leaning against a whitewashed wall and staring through tangled black hair. “The thinking with the girl,” says Thomas Ebbesen, head laboratory technician, “is that she’s naked, which sometimes helps in this process, but she’s not indecent.” The selection of pornographic magazines and videos available all have, he says, the same quality.
“I started donating when I lived in Copenhagen,” says Khristian, 25. “The obvious reason was money. Then I figured I could help childless couples too. It’s strange to think I’m a dad but not a dad.” He is muscular, handsome, with blue-grey eyes. “I come here twice a week,” he says. “I don’t find it difficult, I have a good imagination. It’s becoming more like a job.” His girlfriend lives 200km away. When she visits he stops donating; when they part, “it’s back to the schedule”.
A tall, blond software engineer enters the waiting room. He started as a student four years ago. Now 29, he has made more than 100 donations. Others arrive and sit down. When asked why Danes are so eager to donate, one replies “we are a nation of wankers”, but the rest say that they do it for the money, and to help childless couples.
The same dual answer came back when Schou surveyed 200 of his donors. “Payment has to be above 100DK (£10),” he says. But when he raised the rates, he did not gain more donors, and when he later dropped the price, he did not lose any. So payment is only part of the equation.
New freezing technology means that more applicants are now accepted, but three Danes out of four are still rejected. Donors are paid according to quality and quantity: many earn £10 a go, a small minority can earn up to £50. Thomas Ebbesen says that most donors give about six straws a time, “but one guy’s able to produce huge amounts, up to 10.3ml a time. Some guys are dangerous”.
There are 250 of these dangerously fertile men on the donor books at Cryos. It is more donors than registered in the whole of Britain in 2004, a country with ten times the population, but the crucial difference is that these Danes are producing not just for a domestic market, but for an international one. In Britain one man’s donor sperm can be used to treat ten infertile couples; other countries impose similar limits to avoid accidental incest between children of the same donor, but if one’s sperm is travelling to more than 50 countries, one can legally engender several hundred children. A few years ago Schou discovered that his most prolific donor had 101 children: that tally may have risen.
A thousand years ago the world faced a similar invasion of Danish men, rampaging into foreign gene pools, but this time it is not a nation but a crack corps of 250, super-fertile troops. And they don’t wear Viking helmets.
Professor Gert Bruun-Petersen, 72, medical director at Cryos and a leading expert in genetics, says that the Danish characteristics now being spread include “a lot of blond hair and blue eyes, especially for the women”. He smiles. “But I like that. Don’t you?”