A local gametes bank offering anonymous ethnic Chinese sperm and eggs preferred by local people could be set up through a storage license, chairman of the Council on Human Reproductive Technology Gregory Leung Wing-lap said, but donations and deposits were unlikely to flood in, as long as donors could not be compensated for their time and efforts.

There are nine centers licensed to store and conduct artificial insemination by anonymous donors. None actually carries out the practice.

Impassioned public appeals for male donors to help make an infertile couple's dream come true were likely to be impotent, he said.

Hong Kong's last anonymous sperm bank went bust in 2008 - due to improvements in technology to extract and rejuvenate sub-par sperm samples, and a lack of deposits.

Inert sperm can be extracted straight from the testes. High quality or high motility sperm can be isolated to ensure they are the ones which make it to the egg.

The embryos are screened for possible genetic disorders. Gender selection is permitted, only if there is a high likelihood that the child will be at risk for a gender-specific heritable disease. Hong Kong does not allow gender selection based on a couple's preference for either a boy or a girl

(HK Edition 08/30/2013 page3)