Chapter 2, Problem 2CS

Over a period of two years, a man in his early 20s received a series of intermittent chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments for Hodgkin disease. During this therapy, he and his wife were unable to initiate a pregnancy. The man had a series of his semen samples examined at a fertility clinic. The findings revealed that shortly after each treatment very few mature sperm were present, and abnormal chromosome numbers were often observed in developing spermatocytes. However, such chromosome abnormalities disappeared about 40 days after treatment, and normal sperm reappeared about 74 days post-treatment. Do you think that exposure to chemotherapy and radiotherapy would cause more problems to spermatocytes than to mature sperm?