The Irrelevant Man

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Be afraid. Be very afraid.

USNews.com: In Brief - "Sex: The Irrlelvant Man" by Thomas Hayden

It was bound to come to this. First artificial insemination and sperm donors made fathers interchangeable. Now, scientists report in Nature, they've developed a technique that could make men irrelevant altogether. Using genetic material from two female mice, they've unlocked the secret of entirely male-free reproduction, producing a healthy, fertile pup they named Kaguya. And you guessed it, Kaguya is a she.

This article illustrates so perfectly the dangers of "New Birth Technologies." The constant teaching of the Catholic Church is that human beings should never be treated or manipulated like machines and that every human person has the right to be conceived within a relationship of love. The Church has stood against such technologies as invitro fertilization, artificial insemination and human cloning precisely because these technologies make the loving marital relationship secondary to the creation of new life. Now scientists have been able to do away with the relationship between men and women altogether.

The article assures us . . .

The scientists--no, they aren't all women--aren't trying to do away with men, and the prospect of using the technique to produce human girls remains slight.

Which, of course, begs the question - exactly what is the point of such research? Instead of telling us, the article takes us further down the same road on which it began.

But that may have to change, according to a controversial new theory. In the new book Adam's Curse, Oxford geneticist Bryan Sykes surveys the "genetic ruin" that is the male Y chromosome and concludes that men are headed for oblivion, possibly within 125,000 years. The reason? The Y passes straight from father to son, the only chromosome to do so without "mixing" with a chromosome from Mom, so it misses out on important DNA repair processes. Sykes predicts increasing male infertility and, eventually, an end to our species' ability to reproduce at all. -Thomas Hayden

Usually these "controversial new theories" get a short run in the press and then die. They are more sensationalism than science. However, they spring from the attitude that the marital relationship doesn't matter. Long before we have to worry about the genetic death of men, we should be very worried about the death of love.

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