It’s the backdrop for countless teen comedies.
A guy is broke, he goes with a friend to the neighborhood sperm bank, and after some embarrassing antics, the guy comes away with some quick cash and that’s that.
This perfect mix of pleasure and quick cash kind of makes you wonder why they keep making more Starbucks and not more sperm banks, right?
“I’ve been to a (sperm bank) before,” said Jaime Garza, 23, business student. “It’s way too complicated.”
Well, the truth is that approximately 95 percent of all applications to become donors are rejected, leaving only a select few to go on to become actual donors. While it can offer spectacular rewards, donating sperm is a very selective exercise, which is why students re finding it much easier to donate their bodies instead.
Commonly misunderstood as a simple and speedy process, sperm donation requires a vigorous medical background check of each applicant as well as thorough examination of his sample before he can be approved. The application process itself can take up to 6 months.
Oh yeah, and every applicant is required to take a rectal exam, just to spice things up a bit.
Many college students apply to sperm banks like Zygen Laboratories in Van Nuys, in hopes of receiving the $75 payout per good sample, but few are accepted without a college degree.
“The reason they want to donate is for the money, yes, but they also just want to help,” said Tim Young (name changed), lab technician at Zygen.
College students do make up the largest majority of applicants at most sperm banks; however, they are also the most rejected group of potential donors.
The impact a successful sperm donation can have for an aspiring mother and father is enormous, but it’s not beneficial for students trying to make a quick buck.
There are other ways to do that, and students are quickly learning them.
Scientists in the United States require at least 10 million healthy test subjects per year, according to Circare, a human research organization.
Through the internet, college job boards, pharmaceutical companies and hospitals, there are a myriad of ways starving college students can find the cheese at the end of the maze.
On the popular website craigslist.org, its job board is filled with ads that seemingly pay up to $1300 to people to treat them for illnesses such as depression and insomnia that most people pay for out of their own pockets. Any side-effects that might be experienced are curiously buried.
While the motives behind most of these human “guinea pigs” is quick cash, there are obvious health concerns that subjects may consider seriously enough.
The overwhelming majority of drug trials will feature outstanding supervision on the part of the scientists conducting the supervision and, of course, before the volunteer agrees, a full disclosure is provided to the volunteer subjects illustrating the potential harms of the experiment.
However, in March 2006, a drug trial took a tragic turn in Northwick Park in London when six men suffered multiple organ failure after being injected with TGN1412, a drug developed to treat leukemia.
Still, scientists continue to meet their annual 10 million-person quotas as long as their experiments continue to be monetarily beneficial to its subjects.
Incidents like that in Northwick Park doesn’t faze students like David Noriega, a marketing student who enjoys the idea of relatively quick money.
“Yeah I’d do one of those drug experiments,” said Noriega, 20. “I’ve heard of people making lots of money from those things.”