Wise Words: The Weekly Chronicle

Things you may have missed but are glad to know about. This week: The Weinstein case goes back to Hollywood; the future of sperm may still be in doubt; and a boneless way to find ancient human DNA.

Nestor the Chronicler

Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan to portray Twohey and Kantor

#MeToo comes to the Big Screen. The two New York Times reporters who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual misconduct will have their stories told. The movie will reportedly be titled “She Said,” after the book that Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor wrote about their reporting experiences. If you have not yet read it, “She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement” is one of the best behind the scenes looks at how reporters do their jobs, especially when they are working with sensitive, fearful anonymous sources whom they need to get on the record for the story to be published.

As a long-time #MeToo reporter myself, I can testify that this is tough work, requiring time and trust, and lots of risk for all involved—including the reporters. So, don’t wait for the movie, read the book, you will be glad you did.

Is “Spermageddon” upon us? Or is “the future of sperm” brighter than we have been told?

For several years now researchers have been warning us that sperm counts across the globe have been in decline, thus supposedly threatening the future of the human species. As might be expected, the media have been filled with advice to men about how to keep their sperm counts up (we already have Viagra to help keep the sperm dissemination apparatus up, so no worries there.) Last week, however, there appeared to be good news on the sperm front: A study by researchers at MIT, entitled “The future of sperm,” concluded that we had been counting sperm wrong, and proposed a better way of doing it (I will spare readers the technical details.) The study made the New York Times, which gave the new research—published in the journal Human Fertility—a lot of ink.

I headed to my favorite biological anthropology Facebook group to see what the buzz was about the study, only to find that one of our leading human reproduction scientists—Robert Martin, now emeritus at Chicago’s Field Museum—was dissing it. I asked Martin what was up, and what he told me was not reassuring:

“No new data or analyses are presented in the paper; just untested claims and ideas. The usefulness of sperm counts is disparaged without reference to clear evidence that male fertility steadily decreases below a threshold of about 150 million sperms per ejaculate.”

In other words, “Spermageddon” cannot yet be ruled out. I guess it’s up to us men to make sure the human species survives. Lord knows women have already done their part.

No bones about Neanderthals

The average reader might think that scientists are constantly digging up the bones of early humans, given the major media coverage each such discovery receives. But in reality it’s rare to find human fossils, and some researchers go their entire lives and careers without finding any. When they do find them, they try to get as much information as possible out of these rare specimens, often with the help of ancient DNA techniques that are helping human evolution researchers to trace the human past.

But last month, a team led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, joined by a number of Spanish colleagues, reported developing techniques that allowed them to extract human DNA from sediments in caves where Neanderthals once lived. No bones necessary! As the team reported in Science, sediments from three caves—two in Siberia and one in northern Spain—produced traces of Neanderthal DNA, a proof of concept that could now be used to find specimens at other sites.

Earlier work by other ancient DNA researchers, including Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, had shown that it was possible to extract DNA of plants and other animals from sediments. But the demonstration that this is also possible with early human could give a real boost to human evolution research, uncovering, as the new authors write, “previously unknown events in Neanderthal history” and “time-series studies that are independent of the fossil record.”