Bad news: men doomed
Good news: no problem

	Brendan Bourne

	A WORLD free from war and tyranny is at hand. Men are doomed to extinction and women will rule the planet supreme.
	So says Bryan Sykes, professor of human genetics at Oxford University, in a book that envisages the "Sapphic reproduction" of women by
genetic manipulation.
	Sykes contends that a world without men is the logical consequence of the decaying human Y-chromosome, the only piece of DNA that men possess and women do not.
	A "genetic ruin littered with molecular damage", the Y-chromosome cannot repair ; itself nor arrest the steadily accumulating damage, he reports bleakly in Adam's Curse.
	"Like the face of the moon, still pitted by all the craters from all the meteors that have ever fallen onto its surface, Y-chromosomes cannot heal 
their own scars. It is a dying chromosome and one day it a will become extinct."         
	So far, so bad. The decline of the Y-chromosome has been well chronicled by scientists. What is new is Sykes's description of the implications and the stark choices to be faced by the human race.   
	Sykes is a leading authority on DNA who traced all humans through female genes to a few ancestral women living thousands of years ago. He says that because the Y-chromosome's main function is switching on male embryos in the womb, its demise spells curtains for men. By his estimate, the male of the species will go belly-up in about 125,000 years.
	What seems like an eternity is, of course, only a blink of geological time. There are urgent matters to consider. Sykes voices the most burning one: "Do we need men? Can we do without them?"
	He cautions ultra-feminists against rejoicing too soon. "Destroying the male sex would be a very short-lived victory.   Men   are   still required for breeding, if nothing else."
	But not for much longer, it seems, if Sykes's radical solution is adopted — abandon men altogether. Chillingly, he states: "From the genetic point of view, very little stands in its way."
	His strategy for perpetuating a new female race, free of their   aggressive   mates, depends on tweaking the proven technique of injecting sperm into eggs. Instead, the nucleus from a second egg would be injected.
	With present technology, the  embryo  would  not develop normally, he admits. "But it is short-sighted to say that it is fundamentally impossible."
	However, assuming this glitch is overcome, the only difference from any other birth would be that the baby would always be a girl. "The entire process has been accomplished without sperm, without Y-chromosomes and without men," Sykes exults.
	Importantly,   the   girls would not be clones, but comprise the same mixture of their parents' genes, shuffled by recombination, as today's children. But there would be one other difference: both parents would be women.
	"Lesbian couples already enlist the help of'a man to donate his set of chromosomes to fertilise the eggs of one of them. At some point these couples will want to have a baby to whom both, rather than just one of them, are parents."
	It is almost bound to happen, says Sykes, who can find no moral objection. "Men are now on notice," he states.
	The professor does not venture what would pass for sex once   men   disappeared entirely. All reproduction would need to be assisted genetically.
	There is, however, one obstacle. "If the wholesale extinction of men were to be purposefully and deliberately engineered, this Sapphic form
of reproduction would have to be in place before the men were dispensed with."
	No less controversially, Adam's Curse speculates that gay men's sexual orientation may be handed down through a mother's DNA in a struggle
between male and female chromosomes in the womb.

The future is female - News Review