By his own admission, Schatten was an atypical child. Growing up a few streets from New York city’s east river in the 1950s, he spent hours of solitary delight poking around the river’s banks, looking for creatures that had become stranded at low tide. Whatever he came across, he would take home and examine. He’d find giant jellyfish and horseshoe crabs. In the basement of his parents’ house, he learned how to extract their sperm and eggs, which he would study down a brass microscope that sat on a butcher’s block his dad brought back from work one night.” Masturbating a horseshoe crab takes a special technique, but it’s worth learning. The sperm are amazing,” he says….