The tantalizing business opportunities and disorienting politics of the worldwide decline in man’s most precious bodily fluid

Some time after his father, Abraham, strapped him to an altar and attempted to sacrifice him to God, Isaac suffered another misfortune. He and his wife, Rebekah, struggled to have children. “Isaac intreatied the Lord for his wife, because she was barren,” reads the King James Bible. “And the Lord was intreated of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived.”

But was she barren? Lately, I’ve been wondering. Rebekah appears to have been significantly younger than Isaac. They didn’t wed until he was 40; their children weren’t born until Isaac was threescore years old. Studies show that advanced paternal age is associated with increased risk of miscarriage and that men contribute to at least a third, and maybe closer to half, of global cases of infertility. Plus stress has been shown to degrade semen quality, and Isaac had had the whole mountaintop brush with filicide. Maybe the Bible is wrong. Maybe the problem was Isaac’s sperm.