Sorry – we missed this one when it was published in December.

A 51-year-old Michigan man estimates that he fathered 400 children after donating sperm to an IVF clinic between 1980 and 1994. At the time Kirk Maxey saw donation as a way to pay his way through medical school and to help infertile women. "You would get a personal phone call from a nurse saying, 'The situation is urgent! We have a woman ovulating this morning. Can you be here in a half hour?',” he told Newsweek.

Now, mindful of the dangers of passing on serious genetic defects or of incestuous relationships amongst his offspring, he has some regrets. He is CEO of Cayman Chemical, a 300-person global pharmaceutical company, and has become a forceful lobbyist for government regulation of the sperm-donor industry.

Mr Maxey has made his genome public through Harvard's Personal Genome Project, and hopes that the information will help his offspring and their mothers. "I think it was quite reckless that sperm banks created so many offspring without keeping track of their or my health status," he told Newsweek. "Since there could be [many families] that could have to know information about my health, this is my effort to correct the wrong." ~ Newsweek, Dec 16