Jenny Graves

Yeah, in one way or another.

That was really funny.

I published just a little note in Nature with John Aitken on what happens in sperm.

And I just did a back of the envelope calculation, knowing that 166 million years ago, the Y chromosome was the same as the X and it's degenerated since.

So in 166 million years, almost all of its genes, there's only 51 left.

So I could easily calculate, well, at this rate, we're going to totally run out of genes on the Y chromosome in seven or eight million years.

And we published that.

And there was a fantastic reaction.

People were saying, the end of the human race.

You know, what's going to happen when we run out of the Y chromosome?

We'll be a race of females.

Well, no, that won't work very well because there are about 50 genes that have to come through sperm to be active.

And they're really important developmental genes.

So we do need sperm and we do need men.

So the alternative is, well, maybe we could invent a new sex chromosome.

And that's actually happened in some very weird rodents.

It's happened twice.

You know, maybe that would happen.

But it really amused me that people were so alarmed at the thought we might extinct ourselves because of the Y chromosome.

And I'm thinking, well, we probably have better ways of extincting ourselves much sooner than that.