Sperm Fever

The tantalizing business opportunities and disorienting politics of the worldwide decline in man's most precious bodily fluid

- By Simon Van Zuylen-Wood. Illustration by Adam Maidam

Some time after his father, Abraham, strapped him to an altar and attempted to sacrifice him to God, Isaac suffered another misfortune. He and his wife, Rebekah, struggled to have children. “Isaac intreatied the Lord for his wife, because she was barren,” reads the King James Bible. “And the Lord was intreated of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived.”

But was she barren? Lately, I’ve been wondering. Rebekah appears to have been significantly younger than Isaac. They didn’t wed until he was 40; their children weren’t born until Isaac was threescore years old. Studies show that advanced paternal age is associated with increased risk of miscarriage and that men contribute to at least a third, and maybe closer to half, of global cases of infertility. Plus stress has been shown to degrade semen quality, and Isaac had had the whole mountaintop brush with filicide. Maybe the Bible is wrong. Maybe the problem was Isaac’s sperm.

Six thousand years later, a 25-year-old management consultant named Khaled Kteily spills a tray of scalding Starbucks teas on his lap. It’s 2014, and he’s on a work trip in Oklahoma. When he finally gets to a medical clinic, there’s no burn unit. A few months later, now enrolled at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, his injuries have healed—superficially, at least. A friend is undergoing chemotherapy and freezes his sperm as a precaution, and it gets Kteily fretting about his own fertility. “Imagine I couldn’t be the husband or father that I want to be,” Kteily says. “Imagine I meet someone and have to be like, ‘By the way, you should know: My balls burned off in a freak tea accident, and I can never give you children.’”