Try GOLD - Free
AI helped a couple get pregnant after 19 years
Time
|July 07, 2025
DOCTORS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY FERTILITY CENTER have reported the first pregnancy using a new AI system, in a couple who had tried to conceive for nearly two decades.
The pregnancy was possible because of an advance developed by Dr. Zev Williams, director of the center, to address azoospermia, or a lack of detectable sperm in semen. About 40% of infertility in the U.S. is due to a male-related issue, and azoospermia is responsible for about 10% of those cases. Until recently, there was little doctors could do to address the lack of sperm needed to fertilize an egg, other than using donor sperm.
Williams and his team spent five years developing a novel system that combined an AI algorithm for detecting sperm with a fluidic chip that passed the semen sample through a tiny tubule on a plastic chip. If the AI picked up sperm (the smallest cell in the body), that tiny portion of semen would be directed to a separate tubule and collected. The few sperm isolated in this way could then be stored, frozen, or used to fertilize an egg.
This story is from the July 07, 2025 edition of Time.
Subscribe to Magzter GOLD to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 10,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
MORE STORIES FROM Time
Time
In Cuba: To be, or not to be
WHAT BECOMES OF CUBA? THIS ENDURING AND already freighted question has acquired dizzying new dimensions in the aftermath of the U.S. military operation that extracted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
4 mins
May 11, 2026
Time
Waiting for spring in Havana
The hour has come. It is time for Cuba's dictatorship to meet its end.
2 mins
May 11, 2026
Time
What Cuba needs
I grew up in Cuba in the 1980s. We learned to live with less: less food, less variety, less privacy, and less control over our own futures. But the basic social contract of the Cuban revolution still persisted in my childhood.
2 mins
May 11, 2026
Time
Alphabet THE CLAIRVOYANT
MANY YEARS AGO, SUNDAR PICHAI WAS SCUBA DIVING with his family in Hawaii when the weather turned unexpectedly rough.
14 mins
May 11, 2026
Time
Climate Is Everything
Political independents are increasingly worried about climate change, according to the latest Gallup environment poll, conducted in March and released April 14.
1 min
May 11, 2026
Time
THE CUBA QUESTION
ANXIOUS ISLANDERS WONDER WHAT PRESIDENT TRUMP'S \"DONROE DOCTRINE\" MEANS FOR THEIR COUNTRY
2 mins
May 11, 2026
Time
Beast Industries
PICTURE FRAMES, MATTRESSES, A DOOR, OTHER household debris—oh look, a discarded flowerpot—litter the front yard of a Greenville, N.C., mansion one March afternoon.
12 mins
May 11, 2026
Time
THE FIGHTING ILLINI
IT’S ST. PATRICK’S DAY IN CHICAGO, AND JB PRITZKER IS ON A BOAT cruising down the city’s green-dyed river.
12 mins
May 11, 2026
Time
Margaret Atwood'
The author on trad wives, double agents, the power of teenage girls, and Hulu's adaptation of her 2019 novel, The Testaments
2 mins
May 11, 2026
Time
What happens if banks start collecting citizenship details?
AMERICAN BANKS MAY SOON BE REQUIRED TO collect citizenship information from customers, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the Semafor World Economy summit on April 13, and an Executive Order is already “in process” that would mandate that banks gather such information.
3 mins
May 11, 2026
Listen
Translate
Change font size