We are so impressed by the present and future cornucopia of mind-altering and bodyenhancing drugs that we tend to ignore what really works, namely medical engineering. The announcement for the launch of BioSocieties runs through a list of fundamental topics from genomics to bioterrorism. Surgery barely gets a look-in under ‘biomedical and reproductive technologies’. It is fitting that ‘reproductive’ should be the other half of theheading, for those technologies also, as I have put it, really work now. Unlike surgery, they get a lot of attention because we seem to be playing around with life itself. Even so we hardly pay any attention to what really really works in the case of a husband’s infertility, namely artificial insemination by a donor.