Roald Dahl - My Uncle Oswald

“Not forever, surely.”

“Oh, yes,” he said. “You are forgetting that nitrogen is a gas. If you liquefy a gas, it will stay liquid for a thousand years if you don’t allow it to vapourize. And you do this simply by making sure that the flask is completely sealed and efficiently insulated.”

“I see. And the sperm stayed alive?”

“Yes and no,” he said. “They stayed alive long enough to tell me I’d got the right temperature. But they did not stay alive indefinitely. There was still something wrong. I pondered this and in the end I decided that what the sperm needed was some sort of a buffer, an overcoat if you like, to cushion them from the intense cold. And after experimenting with about eighty different substances, I at last hit on the perfect one.”

“What was it?”

“Glycerol.”

“Just plain glycerol?”

“Yes. But even that didn’t work at first. It didn’t work properly until I also discovered that the cooling process must be done very gradually. Spermatozoa are delicate little fellows. They don’t like shocks. You cause them distress if you subject them straightaway to minus one nine seven degrees.”

“So you cooled them gradually?”

“Exactly. Here is what you must do. You mix the sperm with the glycerol and put it in a small rubber container. A test tube is no good. It would crack at low temperatures. And by the way, you must do all this as soon as the sperm has been obtained. You must hurry. You cannot hang about or it will die. So first you put your precious package on ordinary ice to reduce the temperature to freezing point. Next, you put it into nitrogen vapour to freeze it deeper. Finally you pop it into the deepest freeze of all, liquid nitrogen. It’s a step by step process. You acclimatize the sperm gradually to coldness.”

“And it works?”

“Oh, it works all right. I am quite certain that sperm which has been protected with glycerol and then frozen slowly will stay alive at minus one nine seven for as long as you like.”

“For a hundred years?”

“Absolutely, provided you keep it at minus one nine seven degrees.”

“And you could thaw it out after that time and it would fertilize a woman?”

“I’m quite sure of it. But having got that far I began to lose interest in the human aspect. I wanted to go a lot further. I had many more experiments to do. But one cannot experiment with men and women, not in the way I wanted to.”

“How did you want to experiment?”

“I wanted to find out how much sperm wastage there was in a single ejaculation.”

“I’m not with you. What d’you mean by sperm wastage?”

“The average ejaculation from a large animal such as a bull or a horse produces five cc’s of semen. Each cc contains one thousand million separate spermatozoa. This means five thousand million sperm all together.”

“Not five thousand million! Not in one go!”

“That’s what I said.”

“It’s unbelievable.”

“It’s true.”

“How much does a human produce?”

“About half that. About two cc’s and two thousand million.”

“You mean to tell me,” I said, “that every time I pleasure a young lady, I shoot into her two thousand million spermatozoa?”

“Absolutely.”

“All squiggling and squirming and thrashing about?”

“Of course.”

“No wonder it gives her a charge,” I said.

A. R. Woresley was not interested in that aspect. “The point is this,” he said. “A bull, for example, definitely does not need five thousand million spermatozoa in order to achieve fertilization with a cow. Ultimately, he needs only a single sperm. But in order to make sure of hitting the target, he has to use a few million at least. But how many million? That was my next question.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because, my dear fellow, I wanted to find out just how many females, whether they were cows, mares, humans, or whatever, could ultimately be fertilized by a single ejaculation. I was assuming, of course, that all those millions of sperm could be divided up and shared among them. Do you see what I’m driving at?”

“Perfectly. What animals did you use for these experiments?”

“Bulls and cows,” A. R. Woresley said. “I have a brother who owns a small dairy farm over at Steeple Bumpstead not far from here. He had a bull and about eighty cows. We had always been good friends, my brother and I. So I confided in him, and he agreed to let me use his animals. After all, I wasn’t going to hurt them. I might even do him a favour.”

“How could you do him a favour?”

“My brother has never been well off. His own bull, the only one he could afford, was of moderate quality. He would dearly love to have had his whole herd of cows bear calves by a splendid prize bull from very high milkyielding stock.”

“You mean someone else’s bull?”

“Yes, I do.”

“How would you go about obtaining semen from someone else’s valuable bull?”

“I would steal it.”

“Ah-ha.”

“I would steal one ejaculation, and then, provided of course that I was successful with my experiments, I would share out that single ejaculation, those five thousand million sperm, among all of my brother’s eighty cows.”

“How would you share it out?” I asked.

“By what I call hypodermic insemination. By injecting the sperm into the cow with a syringe.”

“I suppose that’s possible.”

“Of course it’s possible,” he said. “After all, the male sexual organ is itself really nothing more than a syringe for injecting semen.”

“Steady on,” I said. “Mine’s a bit more than that.”

“I don’t doubt it, Cornelius, I don’t doubt it,” he answered dryly. “But shall we stick to the point?”

“Sorry.”

“So I started experimenting with bulls’ semen.”

I picked up the bottle of port and refilled his glass. I had the feeling now that old Woresley was onto something pretty interesting and I wanted to keep him going.

“I’ve told you,” he said, “that the average bull produces about five cc’s of fluid each time. That’s not much. Even when mixed with glycerol there wouldn’t be enough there for me to start dividing it up into a great many parts and then expect to be able to inject each of those tiny parts into separate cows. So I had to find a dilutant, something to increase the volume.”

“Why not add more glycerol?”

“I tried it. It didn’t work. Altogether too viscous. I won’t bore you with a list of all the curious substances I experimented with. I will simply tell you the one that works. Skimmed milk works. Eighty per cent skimmed milk, ten per cent egg yolk, and ten per cent glycerol. That’s the magic mixture. The sperm love it. You simply mix the whole cocktail thoroughly, and that, as you can see, gave me a practical volume of fluid to experiment with. So for several years, I worked with my brother’s cows, and finally I arrived at the optimum dose.”

“What was it?”

“The optimum dose was no more than twenty million spermatozoa per cow. When I injected that into a cow at the right time, I got eighty per cent pregnancies. And don’t forget, Cornelius,” he went on excitedly, “that each bull’s ejaculation contains five thousand million sperm. Divided up into doses of twenty million, that gives two hundred and fifty separate doses! It was amazing! I was flabbergasted!”

“Does that mean,” I said, “that with just one of my own ejaculations I could make two hundred and fifty women pregnant?”

“You are not a bull, Cornelius, much as you may like to think you are.”

“How many females could one of my ejaculations do?”

“About a hundred. But I am not about to help you.”