Think Tank

Refertilization

It's said that all normal, healthy males (and maybe females, too) have fantasies about size in male sex organs; but would you believe 40 times life-size?

That's what one pioneering surgeon sees as he peers at a portion of the male anatomy. Actually, it's a magnified view of a tiny section of the vas deferens--the tube through which sperm travel--and it's the key to the phenomenal success that Dr. Sherman Silber of St. Louis is reporting in restoring fertility to men who have had a vasectomy.

Men who seek a vasectomy are warned that they must not count on becoming fathers again. Rates of successful restoration have been discouragingly low. Now, however, Dr. Silber reports that he has had 90 percent success in restoring fertility to 300 men who have had vasectomies within the past ten years. Pregnancy rates in the wives of these men are running at better than 50 percent within the first year. Babies born from these pregnancies are healthy and normal.

Silber's dramatic results are attracting widespread medical attention, because they may portend a quantum leap forward in voluntary sterilization's swiftly growing popularity as a birth-control measure. To obtain those results, Silber employs a new technique of microsurgery to reconnect the vas. His microscopes are not the standard instruments you may have encountered in high school or college labs. Specifically designed for surgeons, they are high-powered, twin-vision, equipped with special lights, and are suspended over the operating table. Usually, they are "two-headed" to permit simultaneous viewing of the operating field by the chief surgeon and his assistant. Results of the magnification are breath-taking. Tiny blood vessels that are invisible to the human eye appear as large as tree branches. Nerve fibers thinner than the finest human hair are seen as thick bundles of cables.

In a vasectomy, the two vas tubes that conveniently lie just beneath the surface of the upper scrotum are severed and the ends are cauterized or tied off. The result is the same as if you cut a piece of pipe in half and capped the two new ends. To reverse the operation, Silber uses nylon thread that is invisible to the naked eye and specialized tools such as finely polished jeweler's forceps. With the vas enlarged by the microscope to something like the Alaska Pipeline, Silber is able to trim away all the scar tissue from the earlier vasectomy and reunite the vas precisely. First, he reconnects the inner canal to make it leakproof. Then the outer wall is similarly stitched to ensure the return of proper muscular contractions, which propel the sperm up the vas He believes that without the high-powered magnification, it's impossible to remove all scar tissue that blocks the canal and obtain a leakproof connection.

Who seeks a vasectomy reversal? Mostly, men who have lost a mate through death or divorce and wish to have a child in a subsequent marriage. The high--and still rising--divorce rate in the United States is returning men who have had vasectomies to single status. Many seek remarriage and often they and their new wife want children. A poignant case among Silber's patients was a young rancher whose only son, aged two, was drowned just after the rancher's vasectomy. Silber's operation restored the man's fertility and his wife soon became pregnant. Another man had lost a wife to cancer two years earlier. He had three children, but the woman he was marrying had none and they wanted to try for a child. A goodly number of Silber's patients have previously undergone reversal surgery with poor results. Silber's success with this group has been just as good as with the others.

Silber worked four years to develop his technique and believes other surgeons can master it, too, but it requires extensive training in the laboratory before a surgeon should attempt it on humans.

In contrast to a vasectomy, which takes about 15 minutes to perform, the delicate microsurgical reversal takes about two hours. It requires a hospital stay of at least 24 hours and convalescence at home of at least one week; discomfort is slightly more than from a vasectomy. Sex can be resumed in about two weeks. In Silber's patients, normal sperm counts return within three to eight months, but it's important to understand that regaining one's fertility is only halfway to fatherhood. The other half depends upon the fertility of the wife, her age and the course of a pregnancy. That's why Silber stresses that his successes should not be taken as any guarantee or as a reason for a man to have a vasectomy unless he feels certain that he doesn't want to have more children.

--Evan Mc Leod Wylie

Black-Market Arms

While most Americans are well aware of terrorist violence and armed up-risings all over the world (see Terror, Inc., by David B. Tinnin, in the May Playboy for an inside look at the problem), far fewer are aware of the sources of all those submachine guns and light-artillery pieces the rebels brandish. Weapons used by the Irish Republican Army, Palestinian terrorists and assorted left- and right-wing extremists are most often manufactured in the United States or Russia and find their way into the wrong hands through a variety of routes. Since such groups are rarely picky about where they get weapons, they will use rifles made in the U. S. alongside rockets made in Russia. One study has estimated that at least 85,000,000 military rifles are strewn all over the globe, so anyone who wants weapons doesn't have to look very far.

After legal sales are made to approved foreign governments, large supplies of arms can be resold to third parties facing U.S. arms embargoes. This was the case recently when South Africa got hold of several shipments from Colt and Winchester gun-makers through intermediaries who could buy them from the U.S. Although the Justice Department is investigating the sales, the companies claim they didn't know about the transfers. Similarly, legal shipments to governments with repressive regimes often wind up in the hands of paramilitary groups who can enforce unofficially the political point of view the government wants.

Weapons can also be stolen; The Wall Street Journal reported that American grenades had been lifted by West German anarchists who gave them to Palestinian and Venezuelan terrorists. A Senator's investigation revealed recently that 10,000 to 20,000 weapons were "missing" from military units, but the exact number was hard to determine because of sloppy accounting by the Pentagon. One raid by police in Houston turned up missing Army grenades, C-4 and TNT blocks, .50-caliber heavy machine guns and manuals for their use. Traffic in stolen U.S. military hardware has reached epidemic proportions in Mexico, as a side light to the burgeoning trade in heroin.

An even easier target is abandoned arms and munitions. One estimate is that the U.S. left behind five billion dollars' worth of military hardware in Vietnam and that those supplies have not yet reached the black market. Even so, there are reports that M-16s can be bought in Bangkok stores for under $100 apiece. Of course, anyone who doesn't want to go to the trouble of buying weapons can simply ask the Libyans (who get them from Russia), who will gladly supply them to any group fighting for a cause supported by Colonel el-Qaddafi, the country's militantly pro-Arab ruler.

The biggest market is for automatic weapons, such as the M-16 and M-11 rifles and the AR-15, their civilian counterpart; but matters don't stop there. The Russians have supplied heat-seeking guided missiles, small enough to be carried by a single person, to Egypt, India and North Korea. In 1973, Italian officials just barely nabbed terrorists who had set up some of those rockets in an apartment under the approach to Rome's airport. Antitank weapons and other heavy ordnance are also readily available to anyone who is willing to look for them.

In the United States, at least, all weapons sales to foreign buyers are supposed to be screened by the Office of Munitions Control, a branch of the State Department. Arms dealers need pay only $125 to become registered to sell abroad, and any sales under $1,000,000 will not be reported beyond the OMC. The Munitions Control people admit that they depend on the good faith of the foreign governments involved and that, unless their suspicions are aroused by something grossly out of line, applications to ship weapons will be approved routinely. In the past five years, 2,500,000 weapons were legally exported from the U.S. In one case, the chief of staff of the El Salvador armed forces applied to Munitions Control for permission to buy 10,000 Bushmaster submachine guns. Since his country has fewer than 6000 troops, this might have seemed out of line, but the request was being processed when the Treasury and Justice departments got wind of the plot and arrested him for plotting to sell the guns to the underworld.

X-Rayted Film

Do those X-ray machines that you see at most major airports really damage your photographic film? Signs posted by the Federal Aviation Administration claim that the X rays will not affect ordinary, undeveloped film; but most professional photographers insist on their right to a hand inspection and many people pack their film in special lead-lined pouches made expressly for shielding film. The issue became the subject of a lawsuit recently and the details may help clarify this heretofore foggy subject.

On January 11 of this year, the Chicago Area Camera Clubs Association and SIMA Products announced that they were filing the suit aimed at forcing the FAA to change the wording on those signs at the inspection gates. What they wanted was a warning that the machines were not film safe and that all film should be removed from carry-on baggage. The suit, they said, was spurred by a report in Technical Photography magazine in which hundreds of pieces of unexposed film were carried through X-ray machines at airports in Minneapolis, Chicago and New York. Seventeen percent, both color and black and white, were found to be damaged in some way, usually by "fogging," which often appears as streaks on some portion of the film surface. This was especially noticeable on the color film; and the study also showed that the slower the film speed, the greater the fogging. "If anything stood out," said John Rupkalvis, the author of the study, "it was how unpredictable the possibility of fog is--it may not happen at all or your film could get zapped the first time through."

The only problem with all this is that SIMA Products happens, not so coincidentally, to be the only manufacturer of those lead-lined safety pouches. A few months later, C.A.C.-C.A. considered withdrawing from the suit, saying that its governing board had not been consulted.

A United Airlines spokesman said that, while no one denies the veracity of the study itself, it has never been able to prove a single case of film fogging due to X rays. Kodak adds that some cases of fogging turn out to be related to camera and processing defects, rather than to X-ray-machine damage.

40-Channel Foul-Up

The Reverend Gordon Blauvelt was leading his congregation in Hampton, Iowa, through the Lord's Prayer when suddenly the church's loud-speaker system boomed out, "That's a ten-four, good buddy." The speaker, it turned out, was not the Big Fellow Himself but a nearby C.B.er whose broadcast was inadvertently picked up by the church's system.

Last year, the FCC received nearly 100,000 complaints from irate citizens such as Reverend Blauvelt who had picked up C.B. interference on their stereo systems or television sets. Basically, anything with an amplifier is susceptible, though there have been reports of electric stoves and even tooth fillings becoming temporary receivers. Often, the wiring of an entire building can act as an antenna and transmissions have interfered with weddings, funerals and classical-music broadcasts on FM radio stations.

All of this hassle and ill will has been caused by circumstances no one could have predicted many years ago, when broadcast frequencies for various types of communications equipment were assigned. The FM radio and VHF TV frequencies are very close to the multiples (known as harmonics) of wave lengths assigned to C.B.ers; and no one foresaw the day when millions of C.B. radios, some with illegally boosted power, would break into the FM and VHF television bands. Although Congress is now considering legislation that would tighten standards for proper filtering of stray signals, debate is raging over whether restrictions should be placed on the source of the offending interference (your C.B.) or on the receiver of the interference (your stereo, TV, oven, fillings, etc.).

Until very recently, the FCC sided with the C.B.ers and told victims that inadequate filtering on the receivers was responsible and that they should take it up with the makers of their equipment. Naturally, the manufacturers aren't overjoyed at the prospect of adding expensive filtering and shielding equipment to their gear. One writer observed that it was like being told to buy earplugs when you complain to the Government about noise from the Concorde. People who already feel their right to listen to music in peace has been destroyed are left to complain, fix it themselves or retaliate. Since so many people have complained, the FCC has recently adopted a new policy of sending a letter to the owner of the C.B. (if he can be identified), ordering him to contact an FCC-licensed service representative and conduct some tests to find the cause of the interference. The letter assures the C.B.er that in a "high percentage of cases," the other guy's receiver will be at fault and that he will have to add some filters. Still, the tests must be conducted within ten days of the receipt of the letter and if it is found that harmonics or power exceeding the four-watt limit is being emitted, the broadcaster is told that his transmitter "must be treated to reduce radiation to acceptable levels."

While this sounds as though help may be on the way for stereo and TV owners who complain to the FCC, the agency is quick to point out in letters to them that, in most cases, "interception of unwanted radio signals" is the fault of their equipment and getting rid of the stray voices that go ten-four in the night will be their responsibility. Fixing it can involve simply moving your receiver or antenna to another wall or shielding the cable. If it requires something more, do not remove the back panel from your TV or stereo and start fooling around with the innards of the beast. Take it to a good repair shop and hope for the best, since remedies are still in the trial-and-error stage.

Retaliation can take the form of calling up the offending neighbor to complain or threaten to call the FCC (if you can prove he's illegally boosting his power). Sterner measures that have been reported include shooting off C.B. antennas or putting straight pins into the exterior cables, which results in a blown-out transmitter next time the unit is used.

Good buddies, indeed.

Remember The What?

Does that old gag line "I'll never forget What's-his-name" strike too close to home? If so, you'll be happy to hear about research done recently by a couple of experimenters at University College in Wales. Stuart Dimond and E. Y. M. Brouwers tested the drug Piracetam on eight pairs of students who had been evenly matched according to performances on earlier memory tests. In each pair, one student got three Piracetams daily and the other got three placebos. Two weeks later, the memory tests were repeated and the students taking Piracetam showed a sharp improvement in their test scores, while the control group remained unchanged.

Is Piracetam, in fact, a drug that helps you remember? Previous experiments had shown that it worked to improve the memory of animals and also seemed to check mental degeneration in severe cases of alcoholism and senile dementia, but Dimond and Brouwers are the first to show that Piracetam actually improves the memory of healthy humans.

Even though the two researchers now know that Piracetam does, indeed, improve memory, they still have no idea how or why it happens. Or have they just forgotten?

"There have been reports of electric stoves and even tooth fillings becoming temporary C.B. receivers."