Maybe you're a full-time student trying to come up with next month's ramen budget. Perhaps you've just lost your job and you're trying to earn a few bucks in between interviews. Or it could be you're just happy to find a career doing something you're really good at. For whatever reason, thousands of men donate sperm every year. Most of them expect a certain level of anonymity that no longer exists.

There has been little innovation in the analysis of male fertility since the 1950s. Why? Tobias Boecker, Paris-based medtech entrepreneur is co-founder of Nanovare – a system that uses AI to help medical professionals to improve and speed up male fertility analysis – explores the current crisis in this field and what can be done to change things Birth rates are dropping, notably in the Western world. Between 1960 and 2015, the birth rate per woman in Germany decreased from 2.4 to 1.5, in the UK from 2.7 to 1.8 and in the US from 3.7 to 1.8. There are many external factors that influence this trend such as the increased age of marriage, the focus on professional careers, or the modernisation of social systems which eliminate parents' need to have many children to help support them in old age. Another factor that is becoming increasingly important is our own reproductive health, which depends on our lifestyle choices (eg smoking), environmental influences (eg pollution), and medical factors (eg genetic preconditions).

Sperm donor 9623 looked good on paper. Ontario couple Elizabeth Hanson and Angela Collins thought they had found the perfect father for their baby. Seven years after their son was born, Collins and Hanson discovered that donor 9623 was a college dropout with schizophrenia, a narcissistic personality disorder and a criminal history. He had spent eight months in prison for burglary, and 10 years on probation. The sperm bank had inadvertently included the donor's name, Christian Aggeles, in an email to the couple.