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"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," Charles Dickens opined famously of the French Revolution. In the annals of penile history, September marked milestones of the most ancient and most modern kinds-- and may go down in history for being as revolutionary as the year 1789.

The news was first reported, aptly enough, on September 11th. Scientists at Harvard University declared that, using tricks of tissue engineering, they'd grown a penis almost from scratch. The announcement heralds a world of regenerated and customized dicks that could be just around the corner-- even while the news offered salve to an anguished nation seeking to replace lost phallic symbols.

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But as the dernier cris in synthetic phalluses were getting fitted-- onto laboratory rabbits, as it happened-- a paleontologist at the University of Leicester presented the discovery of the oldest known penis, belonging to a 100-million year old fossilized crustacean.

This penis of the ancien regime wasn't much of a looker. Using a magnifying glass, you can just about make it out, as it turned up in a Brazilian fossil of a creature called an ostrocod-- a Paleozoic shellfish whose entire body is only a millimeter wide.

But this tiny cock's significance is greater than its size. "Although we have recognized gender in the fossil record for 500 million years," Leicester researcher David Siveter told NewScientist, "this is the first example of a penis of this age." Like youth, penises–from a paleontologist's-eye view are fleeting. Composed of soft flesh, they rarely survive as fossils to tell their tale.

Napoleon complex

But don't shrug off this ur–penis, greatest-known granddaddy of what males strut with today. Like many men of short stature or stubby cock, the ostrocod found ways to compensate. While its penis would lose almost any size contest, ostrocod males each have two-- count 'em, two-- of them. And in the more recherché competition over sperm-size, the ostrocod wins the blue ribbon-- it has the largest sperm-to-body ratio of any creature, with sperm cells reaching up to ten times body length. (Don't even think about the implications for oral sex were man to match the feat.)

"They have to use a type of bicycle pump to eject the sperm into the female," Siveter says-- with females, of course, having two vaginas to receive all that seminal bounty. And though ostrocod sex takes place on the small-scale, it's of comparatively long duration-- copulation can last up to a few minutes. No wonder the little creatures linger-- with stereo genitalia, there's presumably double the pleasure. "They display the longest and most ostentatious display of sex in the fossil record," Siveter adds.

Promethean penises

Doubling some men's pleasure may be one result of the discovery at Harvard Medical School of a way to grow a new penis. Scientists have long known how to grow tissue-- sheets of skin, say (often using discarded foreskins as a starter). They've even managed to fashion simple organs, such as bladders. But creating an organ as solid and complex as the penis-- even a rabbit's-- is unprecedented.

You may think of the dick as a single tube, but from an anatomical perspective, it's a holy trinity. Penises-- lapine or human-- are comprised of three main cylinders, all wrapped in the outer layer skin, connective tissue, and precious nerves. One of those cylinders contains the urethra. The other two are made of the spongy corpus cavernosum-- which is what gets dicks hard. This tissue is complex-- rich with blood vessels and muscle cells-- and nothing like it has ever been grown in a lab.

Researchers didn't exactly guillotine the penises of their subject rabbits-- but they did perform a sort of diabolical liposuction, extracting most of the rabbits' corpus cavernosum, and leaving the outer penile skin and the inner urethra. Then using a latticework of collagen-- a protein that helps structure flesh-- they succeeded in growing in the lab more of the spongy corpus cavernosum by implanting onto the lattice, in the right proportion, its various kinds of constituent cells. They then implanted this freshly grown erectile tissue back into the rabbits. Since the starter cells came from each individual rabbit, there was no immune reaction.

Once healed, the animals lost no time in putting their new toys to use-- 30 seconds after being put in a cage with females, they were getting erections, copulating, and shooting sperm-- much to the relief of rabbit and researchers alike.

The next step, says team leader Anthony Atala, is to fashion a penis more or less from scratch-- with a lab-grown or "harvested" urethras, skin, and nerves. In the meantime, however, the ability to produce corpus cavernosum the way Prometheus daily regenerated his liver means a breakthrough in penis-enlargement, which presently involves half-baked measures such as injections of fat.

But don't count on the new Harvard penises-- at least in their present incarnation-- to restore freshman sexual robustness. Subsequent investigation of their virile power showed that they were, in rabbit terms, tantamount to the penis of a typical 60-year-old professor emeritus, about half as hard, says Atala, as that of a 30-year-old post-doc.

Still, a cup half-full is welcome to those facing an empty mug-- males, for instance, who have lost their penises in accidents, been born with deformed ones, or who merely are undersized. Such men probably feel that misfortune has enslaved them to sexual dysfunction, compromised their masculinity, and rendered them unequal. It may have taken 500 million years, but for that maddened crowd, bioengineered cocks may signal a dawning age of liberté, fraternité, and egalité.