Lab Notes
Children of Children of Children

As Erma Bombeck famously said, "Insanity is inherited: You get it from your kids." While not technically accurate, this comment neatly captures the essence of parenthood. And yet nothing is quite so delightful as other people's children—or even your own—screeching and laughing on a playground somewhere. The little brats really are our future, and it's comforting when the future is in a good mood and seems inclined to someday pick a decent nursing home for us.

Alas, director Alfonso Cuarón's Christmas release, Children of Men (based on the P.D. James novel of the same name) paints a bitterly dystopian future in which human beings have stopped giving birth, wars and pandemics rage unchecked, and the youngest person in the world is 18 years old. A world without children is a world without hope, and with its documentary-esque portrayal of a human race sliding inexorably toward extinction, the movie is as much a study of globalism, class warfare, security and freedom as it is of childbirth/demographics. The reasons for the loss of fertility are unknown, but we're left with the impression of an ecology badly out of whack. This theme also appeared in the background of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. That novel also doesn't say why couples are having such a hard time getting pregnant, although the movie version gives a tangential nod to pollution—specifically biotoxins that were a side effect of, or possibly the trigger for, a disastrous war. In Children of Men, though, the fertility crisis is total, and despite a lively cast of characters, the shrinking world of Cuarón's 2027 is depressed in every possible sense of the world.

And deservedly so.

Backing up for a moment, a "reproductive toxin" is any chemical that harms the ability of animals to have babies. The mechanisms of toxicity may include male impotence, alteration of the endocrine system (hormones, glands, etc.) or the reproductive organs, damage to chromosomes, impairment of fetal or embryonic development ... basically anything that reduces the number, frequency or health of offspring without actually killing the parents. Roughly 1,000 chemicals are known, or suspected, reproductive toxins—not only scary-sounding industrial compounds like dioxin, but a lot of ordinary household chemicals as well. The list includes alcohol from wine and beer (in large quantities during pregnancy), mercury from coal smog, benzene from gasoline fumes, ethylene glycol from antifreeze and some of the monomers and solvents used in the manufacture of common plastics.

Could we be polluting ourselves to death? Could we really find ourselves globally infertile just three years from now, as this movie suggests? It seems unlikely, but in a slower way we do seem to be headed in that direction. Globally, population growth rates have dropped from around 2 percent in 1960 to 1.4 percent in 2000, while birth rates (children born per thousand people per year)—having been more or less stable for thousands of years—dropped by 50 percent over the past century. This is partly due to family planning and sensible population management campaigns, but as one out of every six couples will tell you, the reduction is not entirely voluntary. In fact, fertility problems are on the rise throughout the developed world.

A toxic shock to the system

This is partly a cultural issue: Although sperm count drops gradually with age, men often remain fertile well into their golden years. However, for better or worse, female fertility begins to drop off sharply around age 30, and ends altogether two decades later with the onset of menopause. This is one reason traditional societies tend to marry their daughters off young—often to much older men. Unfortunately, women in the developed world are under intense pressure to put off childbearing, instead pursuing education and career goals in their teens and 20s. This leaves couples emotionally and financially unprepared for children until, often, it's too late.

(As an interesting aside, a number of animals have shown correlation between age of parents and lifespan of children. Older parents may have different patterns of gene activity that are at least partially passed on to the offspring, or the mechanism may be something else. In any case, the children of older parents tend to live longer—an effect that may be cumulative across generations. By pushing childbirth later and later in our lives, we may be reducing our average fertility but increasing our average lifespan, for a net zero effect on population. But that's a speculation on my part, and irrelevant to the topic at hand.)

A 20-year study in France concluded that the average sperm count of human males is declining at the rate of 2.1 percent per year. The study's authors cited reproductive toxins in the environment as a likely cause. Other prominent studies have shown a decline of 42 percent between 1938 and 1992. The statistical methodology of this research has been attacked, and the conclusions remain controversial and the causes unknown, but if the trend is real, and if a linear decline were to continue unabated, then universal infertility really might be upon us in as little as 50 to 70 years.

There is also growing concern over hormones and "estrogen-like compounds" entering the natural environment from a variety of sources—plastic and pesticides, drugs and even human and animal urine. While not toxic per se, these chemicals have a feminizing effect on animals, particularly freshwater fish, amphibians and aquatic reptiles. Increasingly, all around the world, we're finding male animals that have turned hermaphrodite, growing a spurious set of female genitalia or producing eggs in their testes. Other males simply have malformed or nonfunctional reproductive organs, while in females these compounds dramatically increase the risk of certain cancers.

To make matters worse, some toxins have a habit of crawling up the food chain to become highly concentrated in top-level predators. Between 1939 and 1972, the insecticide DDT was widely used to combat lice, fleas, mosquitoes and agricultural pests. Unfortunately, insects gradually became resistant to it and started passing large amounts of the toxin to insect-eating birds and fish, who then passed even larger amounts to raptors, vultures and large predatory fish, sharply impairing their reproduction. Some species were driven to local or global extinction, and many others were decimated. If you think this can't happen to humans, think again!

Infertility can also be caused by viruses, including common ones like mumps and exotic ones like porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus. Indeed, the film hints at this as a possible cause, and I can't help noting that weaponized versions of these pathogens could be the ultimate neutron bomb, leaving not only the buildings intact, but the population as well. The target nation would not be deprived of life or liberty, just robbed of its future. Children of Men attempts to show what a cruel fate this would be, particularly if the virus escaped to ravage the entire world.

Of course, just when things in the movie are at their bleakest, the sudden appearance of a pregnant teenager offers a ray of hope. This echoes (for example) the rebound of bird populations in North America. When you get right down to it, it's hard to infect or poison every single member of any species, and over time viruses tend to lose potency, organic pollutants break down, and even irreducibly poisonous elements like arsenic and mercury will find their way back into the earth. On a toxic planet, extinction is simply a race against environmental remediation.

But.

Buck up—the future's not that bleak

The harshest criticism I have for Cuarón's story, and James' before it, is that it's unremittingly, unreasonably, unrealistically grim. Where is the biotech industry in all this? Vague rumors of a secret project aren't enough; where are the millions of skilled workers, the trillions of dollars in R&D funding that would surely be directed at the problem? By injecting human DNA into the egg cells of pigs (or sheep, or some other mammal unaffected by the fertility apocalypse), we could clone large numbers of healthy children who would—after some respectable interval and an appropriate course of sex education—start reproducing the old-fashioned way. And while we're at it, why not improve their genomes a little, so this kind of thing never happens again? On the side, we could upload our consciousness into robot bodies, cross our DNA with that of the smartest apes, and of course create sterile dome cities where toxins and pathogens are ruthlessly scrubbed away.

You think we can't? Really? With the survival of the human race at stake and 60 or 70 years to work out the various kinks, it's actually pretty naive—even childish—to imagine we wouldn't succeed, survive and eventually prosper. In rejecting the standard tropes and mores of science fiction, Cuarón and James have tossed the bathwater out with the babies, rejecting even the most basic elements of common sense. For this reason, I see Children of Men as, at best, a keyhole view of the worst areas during the single worst moment of human history. Realistically, there are dozens of gleaming, well-capitalized, well-defended industrial parks right around the corner where the first model year of designer superchildren is just about to roll off the line, ready and willing to dispel this dark nightmare, to claim the world for themselves and usher in the future we've always dreamed of.

So by all means enjoy the movie, secure in the knowledge that a happier, more can-do story is taking place outside the view of the camera, and that the real ending will not occur for millions of years after the credits have rolled.

Sources:

Albertine, Kurt H. and David Tracy: Anatomica, Barnes & Noble Books, 2001

www.rottentomatoes.com: "Children of Men"

Dell'Amore, Christine: "EcoWellness: Something Fishy", United Press International, Oct. 18, 2006

The MSDS Hyperglossary: www.ilpi.com/msds/ref/reproductivetoxin.html

C.W. Fox, M.L. Bush and W.G. Wallin: "Maternal Age Affects Offspring Lifespan of the Seed Beetle, Callosobruchus maculates," Functional Ecology, vol. 17, no. 6, p. 811 (December 2003)

Kolata, Gina: "Study Finds Sperm Counts Are Declining," The New York Times, Feb. 2, 1995

Kolata, Gina: "Sperm Counts: Some Experts See a Fall, Others Poor Data," The New York Times, March 19, 1996

www.netdoctor.co.uk/menshealth/facts/semenandsperm.htm
McCarthy, Kevin F.: World Population Shifts—Boom or Doom?, The Rand Corporation, 2005

Encyclopedia Britannica 2004 Ultimate Reference Suite: "menopause," "DDT"

Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org): "infertility," "mumps," "porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus"