Never give sperm to strangers.
I’ve heard stories about men that, shall we say, ‘don’t go the whole way’ for fear of future financial settlements or legal liability but the latest tale is perhaps taking things a bit too far. Some unfortunate soul is being taken to court for child support payments because the sperm he donated anonymously twelve years ago has been traced back to him. The ‘recipient’ was one half of a lesbian couple that subsequently split up and was left to raise ‘their’ kid on her own.
An agreement, written at the time of the ‘gift’, stated that the man would have no legal or financial responsibility for the child but this agreement is now not worth the screen it was written upon. The men’s rights movement is obviously up in arms about this but there’s not much they can do about it. So keep it in your pants boys because you just never know where things can end up.
What really worries me about these DNA databases is that nobody is really sure how they might be used in the future. The argument that if you don’t do anything wrong you’ll have nothing to worry about is all well and good but what if employers get hold of this data? What if a prospective employer is able to use data from one of these databases to establish a genetic predisposition for hard work in one individual verus another? I know this probably won’t happen but they are already testing for certain personality types and health factors so as to increase productivity or reduce healthcare cover.
Spent the evening playing with Ben. I gave him a DNA hacking kit for Christmas and today was our first time together doing some experiments. We logged on to DNAHack.com for some ideas and then made a culture of my skin that glowed in the dark thanks to splicing in some DNA from a coral gene. Ben said this was totally ‘sick’, which I thought was a fairly nostalgic thing to say. He then asked if we could go celebrity dumpster diving to look for some dental floss to test. I said “no”.