TV Reviews : ‘Assault on the Male’ Probes Mutations

We’re not about to rank the BBC Horizon production “Assault on the Male” up there with Rachel Carson’s and Murray Bookchin’s prophetic examinations of chemical contamination of the environment. But writer-producer Deborah Cadbury’s film is an extremely important document on how scientists have discovered a partial cause for sex mutations and declining sperm counts in male humans and animals.

The key scientist-detective here is Dr. Richard Sharpe of Edinburgh’s Reproductive Biology Unit. His studies in recent years on young male sex deformities (testicular cancer alone, he notes, has tripled in the United States and England in 30 years) brought him into contact with Copenhagen University Hospital Prof. Niels Skakkebaek, who had accidentally discovered a disturbing 50-year trend in declining human sperm counts.

Sharpe found that the crucial cell in sperm production was the Sertoli cell, which can be degenerated by estrogen.

Sharpe then found something more: Scientists in different pursuits were unwittingly putting together the elements to solve a riddle: Is postwar industry producing substances that can actually reverse a male animal’s sex, and what does estrogen have to do with it?

Estrogen-rich cow’s milk used in baby formulas was ruled out, though diet was not, because it can’t be scientifically tested. Other researchers interviewed found that chemicals such as DES and DDE directly caused the kind of sex mutations starkly visible among alligators on Florida’s Lake Apopka. Tufts University biologist Ana Soto--again, by chance--discovered that the common chemical compound nonyl phenol in her lab’s test tubes was mutating sperm samples.

In fact, industrial and consumer waste product is, in Sharpe’s words, “a sea of estrogen.”

“Assault on the Male” doesn’t suggest that men should worry if they or their male offspring will become hermaphrodites, or that modern industrial society should be shut down. But, within the framework of an engrossing story of how scientists stumble in the dark toward discoveries, it explicitly argues that current generations are guinea pigs in an environment awash in compounds whose total effects are unnervingly unknown.

* “Assault on the Male” airs at 7 p.m. Sunday on the Discovery Channel.