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All human beings have in common an original connection to a sperm cell. Presently, each individual human body originates in part from sperm, even though the mechanism to deliver the sperm to an egg differs. But our social mediated understandings of sperm can be quite different. In multiple social worlds, sperm is layered with meanings related to both the public and private realms of human sexuality, reproduction, life and death, health and illness, masculinity and femininity, and populations. My work traces these social, cultural, medical, and historical representations of human semen and investigates several industries that develop political and economic relationships with semen (Moore and Schmidt 1999; Schmidt and Moore 1998). 1 Semen is understood biologically as a mixture of prostaglandin, fructose, fatty acids, and 1 percent sperm cells, but there are numerous other ways we have come to think about …