Believing America faced genetic catastrophe, Robert Graham decided he could reverse the decline by artificially inseminating women with the sperm of geniuses. In 1980, Graham opened the Repository for Germinal Choice and stocked it with the seed of gifted scientists, inventors, and thinkers. Over the next nineteen years, Graham’s “genius factory” produced more than 200 children.
What happened to them? Were they the brilliant children that Graham expected?
The children of the “genius factory” are messengers from the future–a future that is bearing down on us fast. What will families be like when parents routinely “shop” for their kids’ genes? What will children be like when they’re programmed for greatness?
thegeniusfactory.net
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The Genius Factory is the story of the most radical human-breeding experiment in American history: the Nobel Prize sperm bank. It opened to notorious fanfare in 1980, and for two decades, women flocked to the bank from all over the country to choose a sperm donor from its roster of Nobel-laureate scientists, mathematical prodigies, successful businessmen, and star athletes. But the bank quietly closed its doors in 1999–its founder dead, its confidential records sealed, and the fate of its children and donors unknown. While researching Nobelist William Shockley, a donor to the bank, award-winning Slate columnist David Plotz kept coming across references to the Repository. He realized that no one knew how this audacious venture had turned out. So in early 2001, Plotz set out to solve the mystery of the Nobel Prize sperm bank.
Plotz wrote an article for Slate inviting readers to contact him–confidentially–if they knew anything about the bank. The next morning, he received an email response from a Repository donor. Soon he received another from a mother, and another, and another–each person desperate to talk about the secret they had kept hidden for years. Now in The Genius Factory, Plotz unfolds the full and astonishing story of Nobel Sperm Bank and its founder’s audacious scheme to change our world.
Believing America faced genetic catastrophe, Robert Graham, an eccentric millionaire, decided he could reverse the decline by artificially inseminating women with the sperm of geniuses. In February, 1980, Graham opened the Repository for Germinal Choice–immediately nicknamed the “Nobel Prize Sperm Bank” –and stocked it with the seed of gifted scientists, inventors, and thinkers. Over the next nineteen years, Graham’s “genius factory” produced more than 200 children.
What happened to them? Were they the brilliant children that Graham expected? Did any of the “superman” fathers care about the unknown sons and daughters who bore their genes? What were the mothers like?
Criss-crossing the country and logging countless hours online, Plotz succeeded in tracking down families that never knew they existed–teenage half-brothers who ended up following vastly different paths, mothers who had wondered for years about the identities of the donors they had selected on the basis of code names and brief character profiles, fathers who were proud or ashamed or simply curious about the children who had been created from their sperm samples.
And as these strange family bonds came to light, extraordinary things began to happen. Tom, fifteen and alienated from his Midwestern high school, abruptly changed direction when he learned that he was a Nobel sperm bank child, and perhaps even the son of Jonas Salk. “Donor White,” a sweet Southern gentleman, searched desperately for one of the nineteen children he had fathered. Brilliant, successful Samantha was stunned to learn that the donor she had chosen to father her exceptional son was nothing like the magnificent math genius she had been promised.
The children of the “genius factory” are messengers from the future–a future that is bearing down on us fast. What will families be like when parents routinely “shop” for their kids’ genes? What will children be like when they’re programmed for greatness? In this eye-opening book, David Plotz previews America’s coming age of genetic expectations.
Repository for Germinal Choice
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Donors
Although most news articles of the time made much of the Repository's "Nobel sperm" standards, in fact the Repository is only known to have stocked the sperm of one Nobelist, William Shockley. Other donors were recruited from among the ranks of scientists and academics Graham and his assistant, Paul Smith, considered to be "the future Nobel laureates".
Graham's initial attempts to recruit Nobel laureates who lived near the Repository yielded only three volunteers, Shockley among them; however, when the news media began reporting on the existence and intentions of the Repository, two of the laureates broke off their ties to Graham and did not donate. Only Shockley remained, and even he donated only once. Paul Smith was charged with recruiting new donors, and he traveled throughout California, focusing mainly on college campuses, in search of volunteers. Smith later estimated his "hit rate" of donors signed up compared to men he invited to be "six or eight, maybe ten" out of one hundred. The search was expanded to country-wide, and eventually more donors were recruited, although none of them were - then or currently - Nobel laureates. At the time of his death, Graham had expanded his requirements to allow athletes, artists, and businessmen as donors.
Recipients
As with the Repository's criteria to accept sperm donors, its criteria for women to receive sperm from the bank were not as high as initially reported. Rumors that women were required to be members of Mensa were false; in fact, women did not need to meet any particular intellectual requirement. Essentially, any woman who was married, in good health, and not homosexual was accepted; the only women reported to have been refused sperm were "one woman who took lithium, and another who was obese and diabetic."
Outcomes
Graham's original intention was to monitor the outcomes of children produced through the bank's sperm, and he asked families using the bank's sperm to agree to periodic surveys; however, most recipients showed no interest in sharing information on their children once the procedure was over, and when he sent out a survey to recipient families in the early 1990s, few families responded. Two women who claimed to have been the recipients of Repository sperm and to have raised children born of that sperm responded anonymously to a series of articles in Slate in 2001. Both stated that their children were extremely intelligent and healthy.
A later segment of the same Slate article reported on the highlights of the lives of fifteen of the resultant children. Of the fifteen, six reportedly had 4.0 GPAs and two were reported to be "artistically precocious". Still others were reported to be "geniuses" and "whizzes" at various disciplines. All the children contacted by Slate were in good health, except one, who had what his mother described as a "developmental disability".