The Genius Factory (5 page)

The most durable idea in positive eugenics was the dream of turning outstanding men into reproductive machines. The roots of this idea were ancient. In her excellent book
Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings,
Gina Maranto writes that in fifth-century
B.C.
Sparta, a husband could dragoon one of the city’s finest young men to impregnate his wife in order to produce “well-born children.” Socrates advised in
The Republic
that the state should breed its citizens like horses, assigning the best men and women to reproduce.

When eugenics took hold in Europe in the 1880s, Maranto notes, the notion of putting the finest men out to stud was revived. Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge proposed that “a very small number of males of absolute perfection” be used to father all children. Lapouge and other eugencists were mesmerized by the male reproductive capacity. A woman could bear only one child in a year, but a man might father hundreds every day. It was enough to make eugenicists giddy: Why not a whole nation of Pasteurs or Franklins? This mathematical conception of male fertility combined with a mechanical conception of female fertility: women were “receptacles” for children. The product was a potent, if rather icy, vision of the future: the genius factory.

The modern paradigm of the genius factory was laid out by J.B.S. Haldane in a weird little tract entitled
Daedalus.
Haldane, a Brit and Marxist, was one of the twentieth century’s great scientists; he forged the connection between Mendelian genetics and evolution.
Daedalus,
published in 1923, was a scientific prophecy that looked back from the year 2073. Haldane predicted that 1923’s primitive eugenics would develop into sophisticated “ectogenesis”: eventually, children would be bred in test tubes using sperm and eggs selected from only the best men and women of the age. Sexual love would wither, but at what benefit! Men would be raised to gods.

(Aldous Huxley wrote
Brave New World
as a rebuke to
Daedalus.
In Huxley’s dystopia, factory breeding didn’t liberate mankind; it chilled emotion and calcified class divisions.)

For a young American scientist named Hermann Muller,
Daedalus
was a revelation. Muller would be the bridge between the negative eugenics and airy
Daedalus-
style philosophizing of the 1920s and the practical schemes of Robert Graham in the 1980s. Melancholic, attention-seeking, and brilliant, Muller was one of America’s first outstanding geneticists. As a junior researcher at the University of Texas in the 1920s, Muller proved that X-rays caused genetic mutations in fruit flies, a discovery that would win him the 1946 Nobel Prize in Medicine. In 1933, the socialist Muller moved to Leningrad to live out his ideals. In the USSR, he drafted a
Daedalus-
inspired eugenic manifesto,
Out of the Night: A Biologist’s View of the Future.

In
Out of the Night,
Muller said that after America’s socialist revolution, real eugenics could remake the nation. In a postrevolutionary society, Muller argued, Americans would surely be willing to subordinate their selfish reproductive desires to the common good. A cadre of the best men would be enlisted to be fathers of all mankind. These men would possess the two most valuable human traits: intelligence and “comradeliness”—Muller’s catchall term for cooperativeness, good nature, and altruism.

In the current capitalist society, Muller conceded, attempting to breed with the best men would flop. Thanks to distorted American values, women would pick the wrong guys—don’t they always?—producing “a population tomorrow composed of the maximum number of Billy Sundays, Valentinos, Jack Dempseys, Babe Ruths, and even Al Capones.” But in a socialist utopia, women would go for Mr. Right (or, rather, Mr. Left). “It would be possible for the majority of the population to become of the innate quality of such men as Lenin, Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat Sen, Marx.” In a few generations, Muller claimed, eugenic sperm banks would enable the number of great men and women to multiply a hundredfold.

Certainly, Muller acknowledged, some people might hesitate at this fundamental change in marriage, but in the end, “how many women, in an enlightened community devoid of superstitious taboos and of sex slavery, would be eager and proud to bear and rear a child of Lenin or Darwin!”

To modern eyes,
Out of the Night
reads almost like a parody in its invocation of Lenin as the ideal sperm donor, its misplaced hope in socialist revolution, its preposterous underestimation of the male ego, and its view of science as a benevolent God, one that can reverse evolution with a flick of its hand. Yet it was when reading
Out of the Night
that I finally began to understand the Nobel sperm bank as something other than a lark. To Muller and his acolyte Robert Graham, this genius factory was nothing less than the most important project of mankind, because it was the only possible salvation of a genetically doomed world.
Out of the Night
was the scaffolding of the Nobel Prize sperm bank, its scientific logic, its animating zeal.

It didn’t impress Muller’s Soviet sponsors, however. He sent it with a flattering note to Stalin, who loathed it. For that and other reasons, life in the Soviet Union became impossible for Muller, and he fled back to the West lest he be purged. Eventually he settled into a professorship at the University of Indiana.

Despite the disgrace of eugenics by Nazism, the idea of the genius factory continued to entice Muller. With the 1949 discovery of how to freeze and thaw sperm, eugenic sperm banks finally seemed practical. Discarding the socialist idealism of
Out of the Night,
Muller concocted a new justification for the genius factory—a sales pitch for a nuclear age. Muller, whose Nobel-winning experiments had made him the world authority on radiation and mutation, argued that a buildup of atmospheric radiation was altering human DNA at an alarming rate, a rate much faster than evolution could adjust to. Humanity was dooming itself to slow genetic decline as we slowly accumulated bad mutations. The remedy: to freeze the seed of the world’s best men in lead-shielded tanks, and use their healthy DNA, instead of our radiation-weakened strands, to breed the next generation.

Muller outlined his scheme for what he called “germinal choice” in a 1961
Science
magazine article. This proposed a different kind of eugenics than he had preached in
Out of the Night.
No longer was he calling for the state to squirt Lenin seed into women at government filling stations. Now eugenics would be private and voluntary. Families would decide for themselves whether to have mediocre children of their own or glorious ones from the genius bank.

Muller’s “germinal repositories” restored some credibility to eugenics. George Bernard Shaw sent a couple hundred dollars in support. Even Aldous Huxley liked the notion, because there was no
Brave New World
problem of state compulsion. Then, in spring 1963, Muller received a manuscript and a note from a man he had never heard of, Robert Graham. Graham asked Muller to write an introduction to his book,
The Future of Man.
Muller read the manuscript and didn’t much like it: Graham seemed to care only that sperm donors be brilliant and was indifferent to Muller’s belief that they should also be altruistic. Still, Muller suggested some changes to Graham, who took the edits graciously. More important, Muller recognized that Graham was a valuable ally. This was not merely because Graham shared Muller’s ideas about impending genetic disaster. It was because Graham shared Muller’s ideas
and
was rich. Muller had been talking about a genius sperm bank for a generation. In Graham, Muller found the man who could make it happen.

Graham invited Muller to California to discuss
The Future of Man
and the potential sperm bank. On June 5, 1963, they met at the Pasadena Sheraton and agreed to establish a sperm bank for “outstanding individuals.” Graham went along with Muller’s suggestion that the bank seek both “high intelligence and cooperativeness.” It must have been a funny encounter: the two aging men—Graham was fifty-six, Muller was seventy-three—planning solemnly to remake the world. Graham fawning over the Nobelist, whom he idolized; Muller bemused by the sycophantic millionaire. They floated names of possible donors: Muller suggested evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous), geneticist James Crow, and DNA discoverer James Watson. Graham proposed Muller himself. Graham pledged $1,000 to buy storage tanks and liquid nitrogen and another $300 per year to maintain the bank.

Graham, who had a mania for formality, meticulously recorded an account of their meeting and their decision. Graham wrote: “After more discussion of various aspects of the undertaking, Robert Graham said, ‘Let’s put it over.’ To which Hermann Muller responded: ‘Yes.’ Thereupon the two shook hands and the project was launched.”

The Sheraton pact kicked off a two-year flurry of activity. The idea of a genius sperm bank was slightly outlandish for 1963 America, but not too much so. The United States was enjoying its post
-Sputnik
scientific renaissance, and the egalitarianism of the late 1960s hadn’t yet arrived. To scientists, politicians, and journalists, the genius sperm bank sounded prudent, not preposterous. Graham and Muller were taken
very
seriously. They proposed storing the sperm at Caltech, an idea the school contemplated without ridicule. They gathered a distinguished advisory board that included psychologist Raymond Cattell, ecologist Garrett Hardin (“The Tragedy of the Commons”), and Jerome Sherman, the Arkansas professor who had perfected the process of freezing and thawing sperm in 1953. Graham incorporated a nonprofit holding company for the planned bank, the “Foundation for the Advancement of Man.” Graham and Muller quarreled about what to name the bank, each trying to compliment the other. Muller proposed the “Robert K. Graham Repository for Germinal Choice.” Graham countered with “Hermann J. Muller Repository for Germinal Choice.” Graham, the superior flatterer, won, and named it after Muller.

Graham, Muller, and their advisers passionately debated which men were sufficiently outstanding to qualify as donors. Only geniuses? Or geniuses with good politics and big hearts? Graham and Muller contemplated elaborate, government-sponsored panels that would evaluate the worthiness of would-be parents and donors. Muller urged a waiting period: sperm could be released only twenty-five years after the donor’s death, so that his accomplishments could be judged worthy by history. The bank was larded with so much bureaucracy and pompous evaluation that it was doomed from the very start.

It was also doomed because Muller and Graham were terribly mismatched. They were working for exactly opposite ends. Graham was an elitist and political conservative. Muller was an egalitarian and socialist—strange traits in a genius sperm banker. Muller had insisted that donors be both smart and cooperative in order to serve his ambition of building a more egalitarian society. But Graham cared not a jot for Muller’s interest in cooperativeness. He was going into sperm banking to
prevent
the very socialist utopia that Muller dreamed of. Graham just wanted to breed more Edisons, brilliant men to rule over the bovine masses. Inevitably they quarreled. In 1965, Muller asked Graham to suspend the plans for the bank: better to wait and get it right, Muller warned presciently, than start too soon, be accused of a Hitlerian master-race scheme, and poison the whole project. Graham reluctantly agreed to suspend planning. But two years later, Muller died, and Graham was free of his strictures.

Even so, Graham set aside the genius sperm bank idea for a few more years. In 1971, he officially chartered the Hermann J. Muller Repository for Germinal Choice, but then he did no more. In the early 1970s, Graham handed off day-to-day control of Armorlite to his son Robin. In 1978, he sold the eyeglasses company to 3M for more than $70 million. Graham, who owned or controlled nearly all of it, was rich beyond reason. He took his cash, plowed it into real estate and other investments, and soon found himself with a fortune of $100 million or more.

In 1976, Graham was ready for genius sperm. He had just moved from Pasadena to the ten-acre estate in Escondido. He had plenty of room for the bank and, now that he wasn’t running Armorlite, plenty of time. It was the perfect moment, and the perfect place, for him to start. It’s no accident that the three most important sperm banks in the world—Graham’s Repository for Germinal Choice, the California Cryobank, and the Sperm Bank of California—all began in California in the late 1970s. The state’s progressivism and self-improvement ethos made it ideal soil for sperm banks: Customers, libertarian in their sexual and personal behavior, were willing to try anything. And Escondido was the just-right town for Graham’s brew of futurism and conservatism. Escondido was located halfway between San Diego, with its defense and biotech industries, and the Central Valley, California’s agricultural heartland. San Diego’s no-limits futurism was on one side of Graham, the Central Valley’s cultural conservatism on the other. With its hills bulldozed into housing developments, its glorious desert valleys irrigated into golf courses, Escondido had the feel of an engineered Eden, a naturally perfect place that man
still
thought he could improve. It was a place where anything seemed possible, as long as it didn’t raise property tax rates.

Graham was eager to get started, but he knew nothing about freezing sperm. He was an optometrist. He made inquiries and learned that a young lab technician named Stephen Broder was the man to see. Broder worked at the Tyler Clinic, Los Angeles’ leading fertility shop, and he had as much experience banking sperm as anyone did in 1976—which is to say, not much. Graham hired Broder to equip a small lab for him. Broder bought him a few microscopes, some storage vials, and two liquid-nitrogen tanks big enough to hold a few thousand sperm samples. Broder taught Graham how to “process” semen—to measure its potency, dilute it with a preservative solution, and store it in liquid nitrogen. Graham was already seventy years old, but he took to sperm collecting like a boy to baseball cards. He loved fiddling about with the small vials.