Back in the 60’s the movie Fantastic Voyage told the story of a group of scientists that were shrunk and injected into the bloodstream of a fellow scientist to try and save his life.
Despite various advances in robotics, and in particular nanotechnology, in the interim, such microscopic work largely remains science fiction.
Robotic sperm
That isn’t to say that things aren’t progressing apace however. A recent project has seen the creation of motorized ‘spermbots’ that help sperm that whilst healthy are not good swimmers find their way to the egg.
The aim of the project is to improve upon existing artificial insemination techniques that involve the introduction of a sperm into the woman’s uterus with a medical instrument.
The success rate with this existing method is around 30%, whilst IVF can be more effective but comes with correspondingly higher costs.
Each step of the IVF process comes with risks of failure, so the researchers from the Institute for Integrative Nanosciences in Germany wanted to come up with a better way of doing things.
They gained inspiration from previous work on micromotors, which involve the construction of tiny metal helices that can be fitted to the tail of a sperm. This will then allow the sperm to be controlled by a rotating magnetic field.
When the approach was tested in a lab environment it emerged that sperms could indeed be driven successfully to the egg so it could attempt to fertilize it.
Suffice to say, this is still very early stage work and a great deal of development is needed before it’s ready for clinical testing, let alone being let loose into the wider world, but it’s certainly a technology that is worth keeping an eye on.
You can learn more about it via the video below.
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We need not battle infertility. There is enough humanity over the Earth.
Yeah what a great way to weaken a civilization. Or is this all part of the transmigration of humanity towards a cyberpunk future. All those gibbled sperms are gonna need robotic assistance to get through life. At least they'll be easier to manage.
This sounds good but how can they make sure these slow swimmers aren't defective? something must be wrong in the first place which is why it couldn't swim. We're trying for a 2nd child now, hopefully conceiveeasy will work for me again. But if it doesn't work, I don't think I'll ever try this, esp that it's surely expensive. Natural is still the way to go.
I wonder what Darwin would have made of this interference with nature.
Probably not what you'd think. Darwin only observed how things worked in nature, he didn't make the claim that it's how it should be.
Dear Man, please don' t mess with Mother Nature.
Is this really necessary? Males on the average produce 300million to 500million sperm per ejaculate which is about a teaspoon. There are plenty of healthy sperm to compensate for poor swimmers.
Seems odd that they would WANT to allow the "weak" to propagate. There's a REASON the ones that are slow are usually incapable of fertilizing the egg.
Perhaps some genetic lines should be allowed to die off.
Another nail in the coffin for natural selection and survival of the fittest improving upon the human form. As with so many things humanity seems to prefer quantity over quality despite the quantity killing our biosphere and our only hope of saving it is the quality humans. We are in yet another race to the bottom folks and in this context race can mean multiple things…