Why Men Should Think About Their Biological Clock Too

The concept of the female biological clock is no secret. Seemingly everyone knows—and likes to remind women of a certain age (trust me) that the bell starts to toll towards the mid-thirties, gets louder and more urgent in the late thirties and early forties, and falls completely silent at menopause, around age 50. The male biological clock, on the other hand, is rarely mentioned, and why should it be? After all, Al Pacino had a baby at 83, Robert De Niro at 79, Mick Jagger at 73. It’s easy to wonder: is there even such a thing as the male biological clock?

The short answer is yes, but it doesn’t look anything like the fairer sex's. “The big difference is that on the female side, a woman is born with all the eggs she'll ever have throughout her life. And on the male side, there is this constant turnover production of sperm, because the testicular tissue is making sperm each and every day,” says Brent Hanson, MD, a fertility doctor at CCRM Fertility. While women eventually reach the end of their finite egg supply, men continue this daily sperm production throughout life. “You can see a 90-year-old guy in a wheelchair rolling down the hall, and he's making fresh new sperm every day,” says Kian Asanad, MD, incoming Assistant Urology Professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine.

Why men should think about their biological clock too