Four years ago, Cappy Rothman, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Century City Hospital in Los Angeles, made an incision in Bruce Vernoff's scrotum 30 hours after his death from a fatal reaction to a prescription medication. Three years later, after one failed in-vitro fertilization attempt with the seed obtained from her deceased husband, Gaby Vernoff conceived. Her success was made possible in part by the participation of Paul Turek, a UCSF Stanford Health Care urologist and male fertility expert. Turek, an assistant professor of urology at UCSF, has developed a way to more easily select viable sperm from poor-quality samples. The basis for selecting sperm with the hypo-osmotic swelling technique is that living sperm placed in a dilute sugar solution become swollen, but remain unharmed.
Dead sperm fail to swell under the same conditions.
A microscope aids in selecting the best candidates from among the tadpole-like cells. The technique was invented to aid infertile couples in which the man has too few sperm or sperm of insufficient motility. The identification of viable sperm, which normally takes only minutes, in this case took several hours, Turek said. Once the sperm was selected, doctors used another recently developed technique, single-sperm injection, to impregnate Gaby Vernoff. In single-sperm injection, a sperm is introduced directly into the mother's egg, circumventing the possibility that sperm will be too weak or otherwise incapable of penetrating the egg.