Chance is hugely significant in biology. In fact, the presence of apparent randomness in so many aspects of biology - from mutations in DNA to the chance involved in that one sperm reaching that one egg that became you - suggests that randomness is useful, even necessary, in very many cases.

Alice Roberts

Chance is hugely significant in biology. In fact, the presence of apparent randomness in so many aspects of biology - from mutations in DNA to the chance involved in that one sperm reaching that one egg that became you - suggests that randomness is useful, even necessary, in very many cases.

Alice Roberts

Man comes not from an egg but from an animalcule that is found in male sperm.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

For my part, I would say that the male sperm and seeds of plants have been penetrated so far that there is nothing further to discover in this great secret, but I could err in my opinion.

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

Football is a fertility festival. Eleven sperm trying to get into the egg. I feel sorry for the goalkeeper.

Bjork

Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change.

C. L. R. James

It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells... to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.

Dave Barry

The skin of my character in 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' was some concoction, a spermatozoon of an alien nature that was obscene and weird-looking.

David Bowie

Giant squid aren't rare. Based on the number of beaks that have been found in the stomachs of sperm whales, it's thought that there are actually millions of them in the ocean, and yet, we haven't seen them.

Edith Widder

Sperm is a bandit in its pure state.

Emil Cioran

When we anthropomorphize the egg and sperm, when we turn them into a miniature bride and groom complete with personalities, what effect does this have on abortion legislation?

Emily Martin

Every batch of sperm represents an opportunity for genetic typos - called de novo mutations - to be passed on. A 20-year-old man and woman will each pass on about 20 de novo mutations to a baby they conceive. By the time the couple is 40, a woman's total has remained at 20, while a man's has jumped to 65 - and it keeps climbing from there.

Jeffrey Kluger

In the seventeenth century, it was held by some that inside a human sperm there was a minute human being - a homunculus - that was planted inside the womb. Development consisted of the miniature homunculus enlarging and passing through birth and on to maturity-just like inflating a balloon.

John Tyler Bonner

A potential person is not a person, any more than an acorn is an oak tree. I don't think women should have to give birth just because a sperm met an egg.

Katha Pollitt

Although each egg cell produced by a woman carries a single X chromosome, the sperm cells produced by a man carry either an X or a Y. This means, in very simple terms, that the sperm cell determines a baby's sex.

Kenneth R. Miller

People forget we come from an embryo and we're part sperm and part ovary. We have both sides in us.

Michelle Rodriguez

When sperm and egg unite, something goes from inanimate to animate. It is life.

Mitt Romney

The cloning procedure is similar to IVF. The only difference is that the DNA of sperm and egg would be replaced by DNA from an adult cell. What law or principle - secular, humanist, or religious - says that one combination of genetic material in a flask is OK, but another is not?

Nathan Myhrvold

Spermaceti oil is valued for its high resistance to heat, and thus it is used in machinery where there is excessive heat.

Paul Watson

Women of child-bearing age steadily run out of eggs by the continuous process of cell death. While reading a copy of the 'Guardian' carefully from cover to cover, a normal woman will have lost on average two eggs - while, typically, a normal man will have made 70,000 new sperm.

Robert Winston

Just because you donate sperm does not make you a father. I don't have a father. I would never give him the credit or acknowledge him as my father.

Sarah Michelle Gellar