Men and women both make a big deal of the inexorable march of the famed biological clock that women have. Women are constantly reminded from the moment they hit 30, that their time can quickly run out and they had better make their minds up about whom to marry and when to have a child. One wonders though – when everyone seems to agree on something like this, isn’t it possible that everyone’s being duped?

Recent research at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine has revealed that this just might be so. Certainly, as women go and pursue their careers more than ever before, they accept the risk that their children could have any number or pathologies. But is it their own aging that places those children at risk? Apparently not. Apparently, it’s just the fact that women in their 30s tend to form romantic attachments with men who are even older. And men who are 40 and above have their own problems with their own biological clocks.

What they’re saying basically then is that not only could it be dangerous to a child’s chance of a good healthy life to have a father following Larry King’s example or Picasso’s example (of welcoming fatherhood past 65), it could be dangerous for them to welcome fatherhood at 40.

What kind of risks, you ask? A disorder of connective tissue called Marfan syndrome and also dwarfism, are known to occur to children of fathers who push their biological clocks beyond their limits. There is also the scary possibility of Apert syndrome – a disease that leads to a malformed body.

While the children of older mothers do great on intelligence tests, the children of older fathers tend to exhibit intelligence problems on standardized tests. In rats, there are problems seen in social skills (yes, rats do have social lives).

There’s a reason why men have bigger problems with their biological clocks that women. Women are born with a stock of eggs they’ll have their whole lives. Nothing is created new as they go on. Men on the other hand have to produce their sperm every day. In other words, the sperm that an older man produces, he does so when his body is already headed downhill. A woman produces her eggs when she’s fresh, young and a fetus herself. While women physically and biologically cannot have babies past 45 or so, men can. It’s just that they tend to have unhealthy babies. Men tend to think that just because they can have babies at 90, that everything’s fine with them. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Etiketler: biological clock, marfan syndrome

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