Event Review: Pioneering a Fertile Future

The 'Pioneering a fertile future' event was a game of two halves. We started the evening with a conversation with Professor Roger Gosden, a reluctant hero in the scientific community who has worked on fertility preservation. This was followed by 'The Great Sperm Race', a theatre show created by Toby Peach and Lucy Wray.

The evening started with Professor Gosden. It was billed as a 'candid' conversation between Professor Gosden and Professor Evelyn Telfer. We listened as Professor Gosden took us through his career and some of his research, from the start at the University of Bristol, where he was an undergraduate student; through to Cambridge, where he worked with the pioneers of IVF; and on to Edinburgh then Leeds: A veritable tour of the Russell group institutions in the UK. 

Professor Gosden worked in the lab of Dr Patrick Steptoe and Dr Robert Edwards, the pair that developed the technique of IVF, at the University of Cambridge. As someone who was born following IVF in the clinic where Dr Steptoe and Dr Edwards previously worked, it was particularly interesting to hear about his experiences of working with the two men in Cambridge.

Throughout his talk, Professor Gosden championed the role of women in science. As a woman working in STEM, I particularly appreciated this, as the important achievements of women in science can often go overlooked and uncredited. Professor Gosden mentioned Jean Purdy, one of the pioneers of IVF with Dr Steptoe and Dr Edwards whose role is often overlooked and has only been credited in recent times.

As a scientist, I really enjoyed listening to Professor Gosden talk about his career. As billed, the conversation really was candid. Often in academia, we often only hear about the highs of people's careers, their achievements, and grant successes which can lead to feelings of imposter syndrome, so it was a welcome change to hear such an esteemed scientist talk about their career with candor.

However, the conversation lacked some much-needed context for those in the audience without a scientific background. The conversation jumped straight into discussions about fertility preservation, embryos, oocytes and sperm, and lacked some much-needed background information for those without a basic level of understanding in the field, which was needed to understand why Professor Gosden is seen as a hero in the field.

The second item on the bill was 'The Great Sperm Race', a theatre show and interactive game by Toby Peach (or Peach as he called himself throughout the show). There was a level of excitement, and a hum of apprehension, in the room as we did not know what we were letting ourselves in for. The big question in our heads was: how we were going to play The Great Sperm Race?

We all picked up our phones and connected to their router and popped up as a sperm on the big screen. It was fun finding your sperm (which wasn't always the easiest to identify) and moving it left and right using controls on your phone. It took a while for everyone to join, but Peach and Wray were great and managed to build and maintain the excitement in the room as we all got set up for the game.

The game commenced and our sperm started to move through the vaginal canal. Pressing left and right, we dodged the walls and made it through to the next level. The game got more and more difficult as we progressed through the female reproductive tract, choosing the right path through the cervix proved particularly difficult. An unfortunately timed leukocyte managed to wipe everyone out at one point… Although we could easily refresh the page and a new sperm appeared, so all was not lost, but it did slightly defeat the purpose of the game.

The game worked really well for a lay audience, but for an audience full of scientists we did notice some small scientific inaccuracies, for example the giant SARS-CoV-2-look-alike leukocytes, where as, really they are just blob-like shapes.

Peach is a cancer survivor who underwent fertility preservation during his treatment, discussed in his previous show 'Eulogy', and he recently found out he was fertile. The Great Sperm Race was interspersed with Peach describing his own experiences of cancer, fertility, fertility preservation and his climate anxiety.

In some places the juxtaposition between the game and Peach's exploration of his feelings about his fertility really worked, and made the audience really resonate with his own conflicts surrounding having children and climate change. However in some places, the changes between the almost comedic game and the discussion of heavy topics gave you whiplash and was a bit disorientating. In some places this felt almost uncomfortable, but the topics of fertility and the climate crisis are things people find inherently uncomfortable discussing, and I think the show really made the audience stop and reflect on their own thoughts and feelings surrounding this when maybe they hadn't before.

It was a shame there was no winner at the end of The Great Sperm Race, but maybe this was the point? All but one sperm loses out in the race to the egg, and with the threat of climate change looming, maybe there are no winners?