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Why, every one as they like; as the good woman said when she kissed her cow. -- Rabelais

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On a rainy evening in Copenhagen last year, a diminutive woman in
jeans, ankle boots and a casual shirt waited offstage at the Koncerthuset,
a vast venue renowned for its acoustics. She had been invited by Science &
Cocktails, a Danish non-profit that pairs lectures with drinks chilled in
dry ice. Many in the audience were decades her junior and the mood was
more rock concert than lecture as a voice over the loudspeaker announced,
�The one and only � Shanna. Fucking. Swan!�

Swan, who turned 87 last month, walked on to the thump of a techno track,
whoops and applause. �Wow. I have to say� � she chuckled gamely � �I�ve
never had an introduction like that. And it�s wonderful.� As the hall
quietened, she began to speak, calmly and without notes, about the
animating purpose of her professional life. �I�m going to tell you a
mystery story,� she said. �And hopefully, you�ll help me to solve it along
the way.�

The mystery is this. Since the late 1930s, sperm counts around the world
appear to have dropped significantly. While the decline was initially
observed in western countries, there is evidence of the same phenomenon in
the developing world, and it seems to be accelerating. Swan, a Berkeley-
trained statistician-turned-epidemiologist, believes she knows why.

For more than two decades she has devoted her life to studying the effects
of �endocrine disrupting� chemicals (EDCs), which can interfere with the
body�s natural hormones. These include pesticides, bisphenols, which
harden plastic so it can be used in food storage containers and baby
bottles, and phthalates, which soften plastic for use in packaging and
products such as garden hoses. In recent years, traces of EDCs have been
found in breast milk, placental tissue, urine, blood and seminal fluid.

In the glare of orange spotlights, Swan led the Copenhagen audience to her
conclusion: that the innocuous products in your kitchen cupboard, bathroom
cabinet or garden shed may be lowering sperm counts. They could also
affect the reproductive systems of your unborn children. The implications
of EDCs for human health don�t stop there: they can disrupt thyroid
function, trigger cancer and obesity.

Then Swan got to the �ass-ball connector�. A slang term for ano-genital
distance (AGD), the span from the anus to the base of the penis, it is
�also known as �the taint�, �the gooch� and �the grundle��, she told the
crowd in Copenhagen. She enunciated the words with an innocence that
stripped them of prurience. The audience listened intently as she
described one of her pivotal discoveries: that AGD can act as a predictor
of a man�s ability, years later, to conceive a child. It has provided
evidence for her thesis that inadvertent exposure to EDCs in utero can
inflict harm on a developing foetus.

Several weeks later, when I visited Swan at home in New York, she said
that speaking to audiences outside her field did not always come
naturally: �Sometimes it means saying things like �taint�, and sometimes
it means talking about erections and other things that don�t trip off my
tongue easily.� What has driven her into the public arena is a conviction
that the world might be sleepwalking into a fertility crisis. If her
hypothesis is correct, we need to overhaul how we cook, eat, produce and
package consumer goods, and rethink industrial processes.

Even if average sperm counts have fallen, the reasons why are still
disputed by scientists. Some question whether we should worry about it at
all. �I would not say with any certainty, of course, that we will be
reduced to The Handmaid�s Tale,� Swan says, referring to Margaret Atwood�s
novel imagining a world in which pollutants contribute to a reproductive
calamity. But a dramatic increase in surrogacies and the use of assisted
reproduction are omens for her. As she heads towards her tenth decade, she
fears the time for warnings about what she terms �a threat to humanity� is
running out.

Rudolph Wittenberg, Swan�s father, was the scion of a cultured Jewish
family in Berlin and a writer, who used to read out chapters of his novels
on the radio. In the early 1930s, he joined the anti-Nazi underground. One
day, he sent the security guard out for cigarettes and used his broadcast
to denounce Hitler. As he left the building, the guard came running after
him. Wittenberg was terrified but the guard, who had not heard the
broadcast, merely wanted to give him his fee. He later escaped to Prague
and met a young American, Goldie Ray Polturak. She had been carrying
messages for the resistance in her shoes.

Swan�s parents fell in love and left Europe for the US in 1934. She told
me this over glasses of filtered water in the kitchen of her roomy mid-
century apartment in Manhattan. Ever the rationalist, she was wary of
treating the tale�s cinematic elements as unalloyed fact, warning that
neither she nor her younger sister had independently verified the details.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1936, Swan was painfully aware of the differences
between herself and other children, both because of the family�s relative
poverty, which eased only after her father qualified as a psychoanalyst,
and her parents� membership of the Communist party. �I was always living
in some kind of shame about my upbringing,� she said. She has a clear
memory of riding in a horse-drawn cart with her parents at a May Day
parade and praying no one she knew would see her. Bright and independent,
Swan used to play in a large cardboard box which, for reasons now obscure
to her, she christened Juxey�s House, and which was her inviolable domain.
She remembers repeating, both out loud and in her head: �I can do it by
myself.�

She began her education at a public school for gifted children, where she
thrived, and later studied maths with a minor in logic at New York�s City
College, attracted by the �aesthetic beauty� of the discipline. At
Columbia, where she undertook a master�s degree, she worked with the
distinguished Polish biostatistician Agnes Berger, one of the few women
then practising in the field. Swan arrived at the University of California
at Berkeley�s statistics department aged 24, armed only with a letter of
introduction from Berger to its head, a fellow Pole, Jerzy Neyman. �He was
a very great man, and I don�t use that term lightly. He was the father of
statistics.�

After her PhD, Swan worked for the research arm of the insurer Kaiser
Permanente, studying links between the contraceptive pill and conditions
including cervical cancer, and later, for the California department of
health, where she investigated a spate of unexplained miscarriages in
Santa Clara County. In 1995, she was invited to join a National Academy of
Sciences committee examining the impact of �hormonally active agents in
the environment� � EDCs. As the group�s only statistician, she was asked
to review a Danish study, claiming to show a significant drop in sperm
counts between 1938 and 1991. �[The committee] said: �Would you look at
this, because it doesn�t look very convincing. I don�t think we have to
pay much attention to it, but just look at it and let us know�,� she told
me. The study had been carried out after a senior doctor noticed that
sperm counts in semen samples in his lab appeared to be falling over time.
He�d commissioned an analysis of existing studies, almost half of which
originated from the US.

Swan said she was �totally naive� about the internal politics of the
committee, which included a representative from a lobbying firm that had
worked for Monsanto and the Chemical Manufacturers Association. It would
end up being, she recalled, �an extremely tumultuous experience�. Like the
rest of the committee, she was initially sceptical that the sharp drop in
sperm counts suggested by the Danish study could be real. She looked for
�confounders�, factors that might skew results. But when Swan obtained the
original 61 studies and analysed how the sperm had been counted, the ages
of the men, how many were obese, how they had been recruited, what country
they were from, the results astonished her.

�When I put it all together and ran the numbers, they had not changed to
the second decimal place . . . I thought wow.� Even then, she did not
accept the findings. She wondered if the studies had been selected in a
biased way. She added 40 more, published since the initial work. The
overall conclusion �almost exactly� matched that of the original team. The
process had taken almost five years and turned her from a sceptic into a
believer.

Fred vom Saal, a biological sciences professor who had conducted some of
the earliest studies on endocrine disruption and also sat on the
committee, recalled that when Swan presented her findings, she faced
pushback from members who were uncomfortable with her conclusions. The
committee�s final report, published in 1999, reflected this tension.
Unanimity had been �readily achieved� in some areas, the authors noted,
confirming that exposures to EDCs at high concentrations �can affect
wildlife and human health� and lead to developmental abnormalities in
wildlife. But it had proved �extraordinarily difficult in others�, it
said, including on the issue of declining sperm production in humans.

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Subject	Author
Global sperm counts are falling. This scientist believes she knows why	useapen
Global sperm counts are falling. This scientist believes she knows why	Josh Parsons
Global sperm counts are falling. This scientist believes she	Marcus Aurelius

Why, every one as they like; as the good woman said when she kissed her cow. -- Rabelais

interests / soc.men / Re: Global sperm counts are falling. This scientist believes she knows why

interests / soc.men / Re: Global sperm counts are falling. This scientist believes she knows why