Here’s a headline to savour: “Does having a father shorten your life?” Think about it. One might argue that without a father your life is shortened infinitely. But never mind, the reason this story from ABC is of interest is because it details a paper just published in Human Reproduction that shows the genes associated with sperm are responsible for the shorter lifespan typically seen in male mammals.

The study was by Manabu Kawahara from Saga University, Japan and Tomohiro Kono from Tokyo University of Agriculture, Japan. They manipulated genes (or in the Daily Telegraph’s words used “complicated science”) in mice pups so that they were grown from two sets of female genes – the mice had no father.

These mice lived a third longer than normal mice.

Back at the UK’s Daily Telegraph, a bit of background, explaining that the reason women seem to live, on average, longer than men has been attributed, in the UK at least, to a healthier lifestyle, more secure jobs and a tendency to report problems to a doctor. Never was it thought, apparently, that the genes that come to us from sperm are to blame.

The BBC tells us how the fatherless mice were lighter and smaller at birth than conventional mice, but seemed to have better immune systems.

The results support the idea that “male mammals have evolved larger body sizes to increase the chances of mating, though at the cost of a shorter life span; whereas females maximize their reproductive success by conserving energy for delivering and nurturing offspring,” so says Science Now.

I’m not sure what this knowledge will bring us – are we in future going to create all mammals from female genomes to keep us all alive longer? An interesting thought.

Image: Wellcome collection