Biologische Untersuchungen (Die Spermien der Vogel)

"I’ve always been interested in reproduction and birds. And I’ve managed to combine my two passions into one career. I’ve researched bird reproduction for 30 years, with a particular emphasis on sperm. There’s a lot of interest in this area, partly because of a change in biological thinking in the 1960s. . Retzius is one of my heroes: a well-trained polymath from a dynasty of scientists. He had a fortunate break in his thirties – he married the daughter of a newspaper magnate. She was so rich that he never had to work again. He bought the best microscope on the market and published his results in the way he wanted to. He spent his career doing fundamental zoological anatomy using the microscope. This book is one of a series. He was a very skilled draftsman and did beautiful drawings. This was in the late 1800s. He was Swedish, and was nominated 12 times for a Nobel Prize. He never quite made it. When he was about 60, Retzius became interested in the microscopy of sperm. He started buying specimens – including a chimpanzee pickled in brandy – and dissected them. He was amazed at the tremendous diversity of sperm in different animals. For those of us working in the field today, Retzius was the first spermatologist and the first person to make an encyclopedic directory of animal sperm. He didn’t do much interpretation. He just described in tremendous detail, and with great accuracy, what he saw. Many of us have a basic image of sperm in our heads: a tadpole with an elongated tail. Some insects produce sperm that look like discs, with no tails at all. The bird sperm I study have augur-shaped heads and helix-shaped tails. Fruit flies, just two or three millimetres long, have sperm that stretch up to ten centimetres because they are in rolls like balls of thread. That’s phenomenal."