A No Men Land

I came across a rather interesting article this morning. It was about how British scientists have grown human sperm in the laboratory. It was reported in the Journal Stem Cells and Development that Biologist Karim Nayernia created a cocktail of chemicals and vitamins that turned human stem cells into sperm.

It's an interesting scenario of which with this discovery, of men are able father children that are genetically their own, possibly from just a sliver of their skin. Another mind boggling scenario is the possibility of this new discovery to produce babies from those who are already 6 foot under!

It looks like as time passes, women are getting more and more dominant. If we look back few hundred years ago, in general, women's role in this world are not significant. As time passes, equal rights are given to women and sex discrimination are reduced. The saying "A woman's place is in the kitchen" is no longer practical in this era, where as we can see, the numbers of women graduating from universities exceeds that is of men and more women are now engaging in various work field that were once only dominated by men.

So, does it really surprise us, that one day, there will be a new world - a world without men? Nature itself has proven in some animals, it is possible for the egg to develop without being fertilized by sperm. This process is called parthenogenesis. Gibson reported that parthenogenesis has been described before in about 70 species of vertebrates, and has been shown in some snakes, fish, a monitor lizard and even a turkey.

In an all-female whiptail lizard members, the uniparens lizards are in a sense bisexual in their behavior, alternating their roles. Which one plays the male in the aggressive pseudocopulatory event appears to be related to ovulation cycles, rather than size and age. The "male' of the pair either is past the point of ovulation (egg release), or its reproductive system is inactive. The preovulatory "female,' however, has large ovarian follicles and lays eggs about a month after the spurious mating dance.

Although scientists and nature has proven that there is a rising possibility of a future in which males are redundant, but to live in an all-female world is something unimaginable and personally for me, unbearable! To have just 20 females in a room is already a chaos, what more in a world filled with them?? So, although males could sometimes be a pain, and despite all of their shorcomings, the world still needs them to keep the balance in this topsy-turvyness world of ours.