Imagine you are sitting on the A34 in morning rush hour. You’d be lucky to average the 15 miles per hour that the cyclists whizzing past you are probably reaching.

Now, if you were riding a sperm, you would be going about double that speed! Sperm are in a hurry. They are microscopic, yet they travel at an eager 28 miles per hour to reach Destination Ovum.

You have probably seen the endearing, tadpole-like images of a sperm, thinking how harmless they look (knowing better!). But have you ever thought about what motivates a sperm? The unfair plight of the little swimmers? Always a sucker for the underdog I am here to set the science of sperm straight.

I remember scoffing at the arrogance of man, looking at a picture of how babies were made in an old medical textbook. It showed a sperm with a fully formed human inside it. Women, so insignificant that they merely carried the baby that was provided, already complete, by the superior man. And they weren’t entirely wrong – we do need sperm, just as much as the ovum.

And while the egg sits like lady muck in her comfy, little home let’s take a look at Sperm A, and the almighty great battle it has ahead.

To begin with the odds are against Sperm A, it is one in 120 million sperm vying for poll position in the starting line of the vas deferens. It is off to a flying start and it all looks too easy until WHAM! Sperm A comes to the end of the road and finds itself slowing to a measly 0.001 miles per hour.

Not only that, it is now swimming upstream, in the pitch black, surrounded by acids and mucous it could easily die in. But the sperm have a tail, called a flagella, that acts like a propeller and is joined to the head of the sperm by a battery pack full of mitochondria (the same stuff that provides energy in all your cells).

Sperm A gets through the cervix, but then how does it know where to go?

For a long time scientists thought that the ovum gave off a chemical trail, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, that led the sperm through the labyrinth of the fallopian tubes.

The most recent research suggests that the ovum triggers a flood of fluid along the little bristles, or Cilia, that line the fallopian tubes.

Sperm A is tailor-made to swim upstream and uses the head-on currents like lights along a landing strip leading straight to Destination Ovum.

After all that hard work Sperm A makes the ultimate sacrifice and gives its own life, ramming head-on into the ovum.

It oozes an enzyme that fuses its head to the shell of the ovum.

Once fused, its final act is to drop its payload of genetic information into the ovum and bingo! The beginning of new life. It’s like the season finale of East Enders!