Meiotic Investigations in Man

Abstract

IT is widely believed that meiotic investigations in man are only possible on freshly fixed testicular biopsies, or on fœtal ovary. As these investigations provide the only method for the detection of such aberrations as paracentric inversions, reciprocal translocations involving pieces of similar size, and small deficiencies of long chromosome arms, and as these may well be very common in man in view of both the frequency of infertility, and of the extreme variability in chromosome morphology evident at mitosis, any method of obtaining relevant data on a population scale would be of great value. Although remarkable progress, largely as a result of the technical improvements following the use of air drying¹ and the extension of the culture techniques evolved for bone-marrow² to blood³, has followed the publication, seven years ago, of a technique for handling cell suspensions from mammals⁴, no comparable progress, either in technical development or observational opportunity, has followed the work on human meiosis published by the same authors the same year⁵.