TWELVE hundred years ago, the Danes spread their genes in Britain by rape and occupation. Now they are taking a less confrontational approach: a Danish sperm bank is stocking up large amounts of semen ready to flood the British market when sperm donation rules are changed next year.

Cryos International, the world’s largest sperm bank, based in the university town of Aarhus, has recruited 40 donors — mostly blond, blue-eyed students over 6ft tall — who meet British regulatory requirements. Cryos, whose motto is “We keep the stork busy”, hopes to take advantage of a likely sperm shortage from April 2005, when sperm donors in Britain lose their anonymity, meaning any children that they beget will be able to trace them.

Experience in other countries has shown that letting children trace their biological fathers reduces sperm donation by more than 85 per cent. Dr Ole Schou, managing director and founder of Cryos, said: “The system in the UK will collapse. We expect in the near future sales to the UK will increase dramatically. We will be very busy. We have 40 donors prepared for that, and we are trying to find more.”

The company, based in a nondescript industrial park, has 250 specially screened Danish donors on its books, and pays them £25 for each sample produced. The sperm is deep frozen and exported to 40 countries, including Britain, Kenya and China. Since being set up in 1987, Cryos has been responsible for nearly 10,000 births, with such big demand in the US for “Scandinavian looks” that the company has opened an office in New York. Cryos sperm is popular because as well as being plentiful, it is filtered to a higher quality, leading to a higher-than-average success rate for conception.

Denmark has comparatively relaxed sperm donor rules, and as other countries such as Britain have tightened up — particularly getting rid of anonymity rules — it has increasingly made up the shortfall. Sperm donors are used when a wife has no significant fertility problem but a husband cannot produce sufficient quality sperm for conception. In Britain, about 3,000 people use sperm donation each year, producing more than 800 babies.

Even before the ban on anonymous sperm donation, Britain has a shortage. Dr Allan Pacey, head of andrology at Sheffield Teaching Hospital, who has recruited more than 100 donors in a decade, and is a spokesman for the British Infertility Society, said: “Everyone is already screaming they can’t get enough sperm.” Cryos already supplies Glasgow Royal Infirmary and some 20 other fertility clinics.

“We are contacted daily by UK centres — they are desperate” said Dr Shou.

In Britain, couples have the donor chosen for them by the clinic but in the US parents can choose the donor and are given full information about him. Cryos’s US website outlines the physical and medical characteristics of some of its donors, such as Ante, the 6ft 4in, blond, blue-eyed medical student, or Borg the 6ft 3in blond, green-eyed MA student. Potential clients find out full details of donors, such as Jens who is 6ft 1in, blond, blue- eyed, enjoys football, skiing, salsa and badminton, plays the piano, speaks English and German, and is earning his masters degree in physical chemistry.

To prevent accidental incest, there are limits to how many babies can be sired by one donor — it is 10 in Britain, but 25 in Denmark. One Cryos donor has sired 101 children, unbeknown to himself, because his sperm has been sent to many different countries.

The Department of Health is responding to the looming British sperm shortage by planning a recruitment drive for donors, and is considering increasing the current maximum £15 fee.“It’s really odd that to overcome a shortage, we have to import from overseas, and that we can’t sort it out in-house to serve the country’s needs,” Dr Pacey said.

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