“I thought, ‘Oh my god, I have mixed all the samples, I have made a massive mistake here’. And I tore my hair overnight.” It was 2003, and Anne Goriely had just seen the results of a series of tests on sperm samples. At first sight, she thought that there had been some kind of contamination or mix-up.
But as Goriely tried to work out what had gone wrong, another explanation sprang to mind.
Goriely had stumbled upon a hitherto unknown process occuring in the testicles of every man. Like a slow form of cancer, these mutations cause stem cells in the testicles to divide abnormally, resulting in an increasing proportion of mutant sperm as men age and an ever growing chance of a mutant sperm fertilising an egg.
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