Keep Calm and Carry on counting sperm - #BHHMembersInitiatives
BHH member Microptic has published their latest blog in which they discuss how to count sperm properly. For the past 8 years, Steven Alexander Gellatly has been teaching MSc students how to count sperm.
However, a few years ago he read an interview published as part of ESHREs In Profile series where Jackson Kirkman-Brown suggests that a sperm count is a relatively poor index of fertility (Kirkman-Brown, 2019), which may lead you to think why bother teach this anymore?
Whereas this may or may not be true, he is not here to discuss the clinical utility of sperm concentration, as for him, as a teacher and scientist, there is more to assessing sperm concentration than this. Learning about this and also by considering the factors that can reduce sampling errors (mixing, performing replicate analysis etc etc) demonstrates a concept that is fundamental to science: robustness of methods affects robustness of results.
Read their whole blog HERE.