Sex to Order?

Almost everything has been tried for controlling the sex of unborn children, including the drinking by the woman (while an abbot prays) of thrice-blessed wine mixed with lion's blood by an alchemist. The New York Daily News in its salad days even had a sex-control editor. But nothing worked. Parents who wanted boys got girls, and vice versa.

One of these days, science may come to the rescue. Geneticist Manuel Gordon of Michigan State University has succeeded in partially controlling the sex of unborn rabbits. His system depends on the fact that when a mammalian ovum is fertilized, the sex of the individual into which it will develop is determined by the sperm that does the fertilizing. Half the sperm cells have X chromosomes, which produce females. The other half have Y chromosomes, which produce males. So a way to start to control sex might be to separate the sperm cells into X and Y fractions before insemination.

To do this is quite a trick, but Dr. Gordon accomplished it while working at the University of California in Berkeley. The two kinds of rabbit sperm cells look exactly alike, but there is nevertheless a slight difference between them. Dr. Gordon believes that the protein that coats them may not be identical. At any rate, the X and Y sperms behave differently when a gentle electric current is passed through a solution in which they are suspended. Under favorable circumstances, the X (female) sperms move toward the positive anode, and the Y (male) sperms move toward the negative cathode.

When the two kinds of sperm have separated as completely as possible, Dr. Gordon collects them and uses them to inseminate female rabbits. When left to themselves, rabbits produce about half males, half females, but the rabbits that Dr. Gordon inseminated with X sperm produced 80% females. His success in producing males was not quite so good, but in all seven cases where all the rabbits in a litter were of the same sex, that sex was the one Dr. Gordon intended.

Try it on humans (by artificial insemination, of course)? Says Dr. Gordon: "Premature."

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