Here Is a Human Being (14 page)

“After registering on the site,” said Maxey, “it all sort of came back. I said to myself, ‘You know, that was a mess—what were those guys really doing?'” With the help of an attorney, Maxey procured seven years’ worth of his records from the clinic.
³¹
These were the source of more revelations.

He found out that his donations were split, sometimes by as much as 8:1. The benign explanation was that this was a way to make donations go further, to share the wealth, as it were. But the real rationale, said Maxey, was more sinister. The samples were being diluted to the point that they were equivalent to an infertile ejaculate. By diluting a sample of 400 million spermatozoa into eight or ten samples, the odds were less than fifty-fifty that a woman would get pregnant. On the other hand, it clearly raised the odds that she would spend another five hundred dollars for an additional vial of sperm, and perhaps another one after that. Maxey believes this is still standard practice in the sperm banking industry. “The most dissatisfied customer is actually the ideal customer.”
³²

What about fertility research? Maxey found out that none of his samples went for this purpose; all were used for insemination.

Then came the math. At 100 percent fertility, the clinic’s records suggested, Maxey would have produced about 2,600 offspring. Factoring in the dilutions and the randomness of successful fertilization, he suspected the number fell by a factor of ten. “But it’s still hundreds,” he admitted, a bit incredulous even after two decades. What disturbed him more was that the clinic had no idea as to how many children were conceived with his sperm, where they lived, and whether they were healthy.
³³

Which brings us to his unbridled enthusiasm for making his genome public. He wanted his biological children to be able to contact not only each other but him. They could, if they liked, see what he had in his cells and what they may have inherited without having to resort to any of the elaborate detective work undertaken by the teenage Ryan Kramer. To that end he established the Cayman Biomedical Research Institute (“CaBRI”) and its Donor Gamete Archive, which Maxey called first and foremost “a nonprofit storage service.”
³⁴
For a fee CaBRI would store 1) viable semen samples that had been purchased by women for artificial insemination; 2) the empty vials that presumably still contained enough residual sample for genetic testing; and 3) cheek swabs of women who had undergone or would undergo AI as well as swabs of their relatives.
³⁵

CaBRI uses the samples for genetic testing and would test for whatever traits a sample’s “rightful owner” (the woman who purchased the sperm sample) requested. It would not try to identify the donor specifically, but the institute pools height, weight, ethnicity, and whatever other information has been obtained about a specific donor and shares it with mothers who have used that donor.
³⁶

For Maxey, CaBRI was all about trying to reform a sperm banking industry that, at least until recently,
³⁷
appeared to answer to no one. The American Association of Tissue Banks, for example, issued voluntary guidelines that encourage sample traceability; in November 2009 a search found eight sperm banks that were AATB-accredited for both storage and distribution.
³⁸
Much like human genetic and genomic research, the sperm banking industry had spent decades with donor anonymity at its ethical foundation. By tradition the donor is not known to the recipient or the recipient’s children. After Ryan Kramer found his biological father, California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the world, immediately removed a host of potentially identifying information from its donor profiles in order to make it harder for future Ryan Kramers.
³⁹
And some bioethicists complained that what Maxey’s Donor Gamete Archive was doing was not kosher. “Surreptitiously keeping samples in a biobank without explicit consent is unethical,” the University of Pennsylvania’s Arthur Caplan told
New Scientist.
⁴⁰

But the sperm banks’ main argument for preserving anonymity was that without it, no one would donate and sperm banking as we know it would cease to be. They pointed to the United Kingdom, where the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority collected data on donor-conceived births, limited use of a single donated sample to a maximum of ten families, and kept a registry of donor data that offspring could access at age eighteen or beyond. Reportedly there were now less than two hundred British men willing to bank their sperm, while Sweden’s sperm banking industry suffered a similar decline.
⁴¹
On the other hand, this change had served to internationalize the donor conception business. Following their countries’ rejection of donor anonymity, both English and Swedish women began traveling to neighboring Denmark on “fertility vacations.”
⁴²
And Copenhagen might be just the first stop. “In India there are lots of fertility clinics willing to do any IVF procedure you want, no questions asked,” Kirk Maxey told me. “So you order your semen in Denmark, have it sent to India, see the Taj Mahal, and if you have no functioning ovaries yourself, you secure a donor egg and come back pregnant with a half-Danish-half-Indian baby. I know an Englishwoman who did exactly that.”
⁴³

Sperm banks have also had to contend with litigation, some of it resulting directly from their absolutist positions on anonymity and failure to secure and/or track complete donor medical histories. In 1988, a Santa Barbara couple, the Johnsons, used a California Cryobank sample from “Donor 276” to conceive their daughter Brittany, who at age six developed autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease, a genetic disorder that usually appears later in life but typically requires a kidney transplant by age fifty. The Johnsons had no family history of ADPKD, but Donor 276 did: his grandmother, aunt, and mother all suffered from it. In all,

nearly 1,500 vials of Donor 276's sperm were sold by California Cryobank to an unknown number of women in unknown locations before the sperm bank pulled the sample in 1991. The Johnsons sued California Cryobank for professional negligence, fraud, and breach of contract, alleging that California Cryobank knew that Donor 276 was at high risk for ADPKD; the case was settled out of court in 2003.
⁴⁴

Recently the sperm banks have shown a willingness to give a little on the anonymity issue, which I suspect stems from the developments I’ve discussed: the trend toward outsourcing, the ingenuity of and technology available to the Ryan Kramers of the world, the emergence of the Donor Sibling Registry and the Donor Gamete Archive, and the ongoing threat of costly litigation. In 2008, California Cryobank teamed with two other large sperm banks to propose the first national registry of sperm and egg donors.
⁴⁵
But by 2010, the details—name or just donor ID number? Access for whom and at what cost?—had yet to be ironed out. I had my doubts as to whether they ever would be.

I don’t have any data to back it up, but I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that Maxey was not a typical sperm donor. He had and has strong proprietary feelings for his biological children: “[T]hey’re my kids,” he told PBS in 2006. “They’re kids that I adopted out when they were single cells.”
⁴⁶
Thus the Donor Gamete Archive is partly self-serving, and I mean that in the best way. And his book,
Pig Blood,
was written not to achieve literary stardom, but as another way to reach the hundreds of offspring carrying Maxey chromosomes, most of whom were believed to reside within 150 miles of Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Pig Blood
recounts his time working on ranches and in laboratories, and includes pointed essays about evolution (it’s still going on) and climate change (it’s happening but we’ll be fine). The back cover says:

By the end of 2009, Maxey had found just two biological offspring.
⁴⁸
“That means that I will die before contacting more than 90 percent of them. That was the reason I wrote my book: so that I could take possession of my own identity, rather than have Google, Fox News and various websites do it for me.”
⁴⁹

He said that the common perception of the sperm donor is an ugly one: “A testosterone-sodden college kid with his hands perpetually down around his groin, ejaculating in paper cups and then heading home with a couple of six-packs to share his fortunes with his roommates.”
⁵⁰

He believed that this stereotype could and should be reversed and that genomics would be instrumental in doing so. In the near future, potential donors would undergo full genome sequencing. Those carrying deadly single-gene disorders would be culled from the donor pool much as the Red Cross selects out HIV-positive individuals. The elimination of those without a “Clean Genome” would shrink the donor pool by half. Of those remaining, 90 percent would be excluded based on inadequate sperm count and/or inability of their samples to withstand the freezethaw cycle. “What’s left can only be described as an elite,” Kirk wrote in an email. “And they should be treated that way. Their compensation should be sufficient to require only a modest second source of income. Remember: the scheduling for twice-weekly donations leaves only one night per week for regular sex—that’s something of a sacrifice (well, I can only speak for myself $$). I think donors should be thought of more or less like monks.”
⁵¹

But of course, they could be monks with a thousand kids. And if tradition holds, Kirk admitted, most of those kids would be sired by lean monks over six feet tall. But he rejected the notion that this amounted to eugenics. “Eugenics is state-sponsored. This is what
everyone
is allowed to practice: PERSONAL eugenics. And only the mothers are allowed to choose. They get to pick the traits and the person whose genes they will help carry into the next generation.”
⁵²

I could hear my ethicist and social-scientist colleagues groaning and gnashing their teeth. But in George’s eyes, Maxey’s travails were neither a deterrent nor a source of shame; on the contrary, “Kirk didn’t ask to have four hundred kids. He has seen a worst-case scenario. He might not be perfectly innocent in all of this, but he has seen, firsthand, genetics gone awry. I think having people who’ve lived through failure is very important for the early stages of this project.”
⁵³

“Since I’m pretty famous, I’d rather keep my name and email address private to all but the PGP researchers for now,” read the email.
⁵⁴

For more than a year, none of us other than George, Jason, and the IRB knew who PGP Participant #6 was. In mid-2007, I asked George exactly what the deal was with Mr./Ms. X. “He/she doesn’t want to participate in any of our discussions or with any of the press,” he said.
⁵⁵

“Did you have any qualms about this person’s reticence?” I asked.

“I wasn’t wild about it, but … we should expect this to happen. Now I think it’s great,” he said.
⁵⁶
As usual, the Churchian view was sunny. But he was not completely convincing.

I pressed him on #6's identity. Based on his/her anonymous responses to the initial questionnaire George had sent around, I was sure s/he was a woman, though I couldn’t say why.

“It’s a man,” said George. “Just don’t ask me his zip code.”
⁵⁷

I wondered why this guy would want to participate in such a public project and still remain anonymous. How could he expect to have his cake and eat it, too?

“He has dealt with the press quite a bit—he’s been there and done that. It’s not exciting to him and he doesn’t want to spend any more time on it, especially since this isn’t really his party. But he’s certainly interested in this topic.”
⁵⁸

I thought this playing hard to get was maybe a bit pretentious, but it also lent the proceedings an air of mystery. I was intrigued. Who was this famous man who, according to his email, was a Harvard professor, hated chocolate, and didn’t really want to meet the rest of us?
⁵⁹

“I’ve got it!” I said to George one day. “It’s Alan Dershowitz!”
⁶⁰
I had been thinking this for a while and was hoping it wasn’t true: I found Dershowitz to be an insufferable gasbag—even in those instances when I agreed with him—and not someone I wanted to represent the PGP. It was bad enough when he was asked to speak for the Jews. Now he would be holding forth on genetics?

George laughed. “Well, I suppose it could have been him, since I know Alan fairly well. Good guess … but no.”

And then he told me who it was. A few months after that, I met Professor Chocolate Hater himself. Steven Pinker has a lion’s mane of hair (a self-described member of the “Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club For Scientists”
⁶¹
), a wide jaw, and a small, shallow cleft in his chin. He is short and thin. He wears stylish boots. He speaks in a quiet, measured, slightly nasal voice with a noticeable Anglo-Canadian accent. And he has piercing, iridescent blue eyes. In 2004 he engaged in a conversation on consciousness, morality, Gödel, and objective reality (among other subjects) in
SEED
magazine with the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein;
⁶²
not long after that the two were married.
⁶³
He is a prolific writer on the subjects of language, evolutionary psychology, and cognition. He is the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard. The novelist Ian McEwan said of him, “I sometimes follow up, when Steve has been in public debates, transcripts of things said on the wing. And I’m always struck by the extraordinary wit and articulacy—even though he is not at his word processor—just defending his position or indeed attacking a point.”
⁶⁴