The Genius Factory (6 page)

The idea of a genius sperm bank made a certain amount of sense, but never as much as Graham dreamed. Graham was making the best of the crude science of his time. If you were hoping to give kids better genes, this was all you could hope to do in the late 1970s. At the time, sperm collection was practically the only widely available fertility treatment that worked. Social science research was beginning to show that intelligence was at least partly heritable. So it was logical that if you were going to have a sperm bank, you might as well select smart men, rather than drag Joe Donors off the street, which is more or less what other banks were doing.

Nothing much was likely to go wrong with Nobel donors, but nor were they the great boon Graham believed they were. Graham thought his donors would supply a massive intelligence boost. In fact, the genetic improvement was probably minuscule. Nobel sperm would give
modest
odds of
slightly
better genes in the
half
share of chromosomes supplied by the father. And even then Graham would be operating on only the nature side of the equation: he had no control over nurture—schools, upbringing, parents. This was a formula for a B-plus student, not the “secular savior” Graham hoped to breed.

Graham puzzled over which men should stock his bank. At first he considered a military sperm bank—only West Point and Naval Academy grads. But eventually he returned to his original idea: the world’s smartest men. The best objective measure of
useful
intelligence, Graham thought, was the Nobel Prize—and not just any Nobel Prize but a Nobel Prize in the sciences. He had a narrow imagination about human accomplishment. Graham didn’t believe in “multiple intelligences”: He believed in
one
intelligence. When he talked about intelligence, all he meant was practical problem-solving ability: Edison, Fulton, Watson, or Crick. (Graham valued, by miraculous coincidence,
exactly
the same kind of analytical talent he himself possessed.) He was blind to the intelligence required for artistic genius, for psychological insight, or for political deftness. Those kinds of intelligence were worthless to Graham, because they couldn’t be measured. Scientific ability could be counted in numbers of patents or an IQ score. There was no place for a Picasso or Roosevelt in Graham’s Pantheon. A Shakespeare play couldn’t light a city at night or fly to the moon. Inventors were the only people who changed the world, and it was their genes that needed saving. (Graham never grappled with a basic contradiction in his own thought: inventions made life more comfortable for the masses, yet Graham believed that comfort was what encouraged the shiftless and stupid to reproduce so rapidly. Thus the better the inventors made the world, the worse the evolutionary crisis.)

Graham always described the Repository as a “genius” sperm bank, yet in some ways he wasn’t actually seeking genius. The kind of genius in a Leonardo or an Einstein—incomprehensible, impossible for ordinary minds to follow—was too difficult for Graham. Partly Graham knew, as most scholars of genius have recognized, that it was impossible to manufacture an Einstein. Such transcendent genius arrived uninvited and unexpected, and tended to disappear, too. Einstein left no Einstein-like kids. But Graham also ignored that kind of genius because it didn’t match the intelligence he admired: high analytical and technical ability married to hard work. Graham wouldn’t have known what to do with an oddball like Einstein. He did know what to do with a dozen engineers.

With Muller dead, Graham felt free to make the bank
he
wanted to make. Graham scrapped Muller’s idea of waiting till a donor was twenty-five years dead before releasing the sperm: the world was going to hell too fast to wait. He also abandoned Muller’s altruism requirement for donors, which he had always thought was pointless. So in the late 1970s, Graham fired off flattering letters to all the Nobel Science laureates he could find in California. Their genes were precious, he told them. Could they do a good deed for the world? Would they share their glorious genetic heritage with desperate infertile couples?

When a Nobelist responded to a letter with even the slightest interest, Graham followed up with effusive phone calls to schedule a collection. He took Broder on his collecting expeditions, and both men loved the trips. Broder, still in his twenties, was starstruck when he met the laureates. Graham took pleasure in adding the Nobelists to his lifelong collection of Great Men. (Sometimes the sperm bank seemed a kind of supercharged autograph collection for Graham.) Graham was respectful toward the donors. He always called them “Doctor.” He read up on them in advance and asked them polite, informed questions about their work, but not too many, because he thought their time was precious. Even with the Nobelists, however, Graham was unbothered by the inherent awkwardness of asking a man to masturbate in a cup for him.

At first, Graham and Broder collected sperm nearby. They would book a pair of rooms at San Diego’s famed Torrey Pines Lodge and fly the donor in. The donor would perform in one room. They would immediately process the sample in the other. (“I don’t think we brought ‘inspirational literature,’ ” said Broder, using the industry euphemism for pornography. “They were older fellows and that did not seem appropriate.”) Sometimes Graham and Broder had to make peculiar accommodations. Broder had a strenuous arrangement with a donor he describes only as a “world-famous scientist” in Los Angeles. The scientist would call Broder and instruct him to drive by a particular intersection in Century City at a given time. When Broder pulled up, the scientist would open the passenger-side door of Broder’s car, drop in a paper bag containing the sample cup, and vanish. Broder would rush it back to his lab and ice it.

In the 1970s sperm collecting was new and mysterious, and Graham and Broder encountered bumps whenever they had to explain what they were doing. In July 1978, for example, Graham and Broder made their first long-distance sperm mission, flying to San Francisco to collect from William Shockley and a second Nobelist. After the Nobelists took care of business—Shockley in a room at the Travelodge—Broder and Graham returned to the Oakland airport toting a white plastic container filled with liquid nitrogen and semen ampules. They had never thought about how they would get onto the plane. X-rays cause mutations, so they couldn’t run the sperm samples through the X-ray machine. But they also couldn’t conceal the samples in an X-ray-proof lead-lined container, because airline security would reject it. They managed to sneak the container through security and avoid the X-ray machine, but when they got to their plane, the crew turned them away, and no wonder: liquid-nitrogen vapor escaping from the container was swirling out in a ghostly, sinister cloud. Even in 1978, you couldn’t carry mysterious, smoking packages on airplanes. The next day, they got on another flight. But before takeoff, the pilot came back to their seats and ordered them off. They begged him, insisted that all they were carrying was a few sperm samples. He relented, and the sperm made it home safely. After that, they shipped by bus and cargo plane.

By 1980, Graham was ready. He had collected sperm from three Nobelists, including Shockley—an “adequate” supply for his first customers. He also had semen from two other revered scientists who weren’t Nobelists. According to a former Graham employee, one of those two other scientists was Graham’s acquaintance Jonas Salk.

CHAPTER 3

THE SEMEN DETECTIVE

Who’s your daddy?                  
Courtesy of California Cryobank

I
didn’t really expect any children, parents, or donors from the Nobel sperm bank to respond to my February 8, 2001,
Slate
article asking them to contact me. I thought I might hear from some fakers and jokers, but that was all. I had read enough about sperm banks to know that most parents never told their kids that they were donor babies, so why would they spill the secret to a reporter? Moreover, the Repository had had very few children and donors: the bank had produced only about two hundred children and employed only a few dozen donors. The chances of any of them—let alone the few who’d be willing to talk—seeing a
Slate
article seemed vanishingly small.

As I waited anxiously to hear from them, I wondered how the reality of the Nobel sperm bank would compare to my own fantasies about it. Infected by Robert Graham’s grandiosity, I had conjured up creepy Boys-from-Brazil visions about the kids: What if they really
were
a regiment of amazing but scary children, pawns in a futuristic plot to alter humanity? What if the Nobel sperm bank parents were raising their enhanced babies in geodesic domes off the grid in Montana—Mensa moms nourishing their genius toddlers with a diet of brain-stimulating vitamins, Shakespeare, and calculus, biding their time till the genetic elite was old enough to seize control of the nation? It was possible, wasn’t it?

Less than twenty-four hours after my article was published, I received an e-mail from a man I’ll call Edward Burnham. He wrote that he was one of Robert Graham’s donors, and he wanted to tell me about it. I replied immediately and arranged a phone date for the next day. When I called, Edward immediately confirmed what I already knew from having done an Internet search on him: he wasn’t a Nobel laureate. I considered the possibility that he might be a fraud, but he was prepared for suspicion. He supplied me with names of bank employees, dates of his donations, his Repository medical records, his donor catalog entry, and even a leftover plastic vial, a souvenir from his last donation a decade ago.

Edward wasn’t a scientist, but he was the other type of man that Graham revered: a self-made businessman. He was in his late forties, and he had built three companies from the ground up and sold them. In 1985, Edward told me, Graham had seen him speak in San Diego. Graham had immediately set his cap at the young millionaire and invited him to donate to his sperm bank. Edward, assuming that it was still the “Nobel” sperm bank, wondered why Graham was pursuing him. Graham told Edward that he was no longer recruiting Nobel laureates. Instead he was now seeking donors more like Edward—Renaissance men who were smart, but also young, athletic, and handsome. Then in his early thirties, Edward reminded Graham of himself. Edward, too, was a rational entrepreneur. Edward’s companies, like Graham’s Armorlite, turned theoretical technology into real profit. When I met Edward on his Arizona ranch months later, I understood the other reasons Graham had lusted after him as a donor: Edward looked the part of a superman, with a powerful chin, wonderful cheeks, piercing brown eyes, a mass of curly black hair, and the build of a linebacker. He also raced motorcycles and played soccer. (And he was a mensch. He told jokes, he made fun of himself, he asked questions.)

Edward refused Graham’s first invitation, but the sperm banker wouldn’t stop bothering him. Graham flattered Edward so much that “I started to feel like the dog at the dog breeders’ meeting,” Edward said. Edward had a girlfriend and he had pets, and they were obligation enough. He hated his own dad and had run away from home. Edward didn’t want children, didn’t much like them, and saw no particular reason to produce more of them for anyone else. But Graham would not relent. Edward could make some worthy women happy, Graham insisted, and he would bear no responsibility for the kids. Edward’s then girlfriend—hoping to get married and have children with him—lobbied him, too. She thought that once Edward donated sperm, his resistance to fathering his own kids would crumble. Eventually, Edward caved. He scoffed at Graham’s grand eugenic dreams—“I thought it was pissing in the ocean”—but he figured he would make a few women’s lives better, and his girlfriend and Graham would stop pestering him. To his surprise, Edward discovered he didn’t mind donating, and he gave for more than five years. (The girlfriend’s dream was dashed, though: he
still
didn’t want kids, and he
still
didn’t want to marry her. When Edward, his new girlfriend, and I went out to dinner, she told me she had resigned herself to not having kids with Edward but added wistfully, “I
know
we would have had beautiful intelligent babies, genius sperm bank babies.”)

Graham told Edward that his sperm had produced several children, but Edward never asked exactly how many. He didn’t want to know. He told me he never thought about the kids. Did he care what became of them? I asked. Not really, because they were not his.

A couple of days after our first conversation, I published an interview with Edward in
Slate.
Edward wouldn’t let me publish his donor color code, for fear that parents or children would try to hunt him down, so I gave him the pseudonym “Donor Entrepreneur.” I feared that Edward’s story—highlighting as it did his doubts about the Repository’s goals and his indifference to his biological kids—might discourage anyone else from contacting me.

Instead, Edward’s story shook the trees. Within days, I had heard from half a dozen other donors. Several of them had seen Edward’s comments and wanted to rebut him. Unlike him, most were true believers. They did think the Repository made a difference. It was not ocean pissing.

The notable fact about these donors: none of them was a Nobel laureate, either. Why did the “Nobel Prize” sperm bank not seem to have
any
Nobel Prize donors? I wouldn’t learn the answer till later.

These donors were a long, long way from the Nobel Prize, in fact. They were a motley lot, not exactly unimpressive but certainly not the great minds of the age. A couple were university professors. There was a former math prodigy—a cheerily self-proclaimed “failure”—who had quit academia to become a sculptor. There was a graduate student who had aced his SAT. There was another former prodigy, who had a gigantic IQ but whose job was doing extremely low-level work for intelligence agencies. And then there was a political activist of a particularly loathsome stripe. I recognized his name from news stories about his repellent ideas. Graham had recruited him at a political conference. (The thought that there could be more kids with his genes growing up across America filled me with dread. I was relieved when he told me that the sperm bank had rejected him for unspecified medical reasons.) All the successful donors said they had been flattered when the Repository had asked them to participate and had contributed eagerly. (One of them had
volunteered
his services to Graham.) Unlike Edward, these donors did want to hear about their offspring, maybe even meet them.

There was one Nobel connection among the donors who contacted me, but it wasn’t what I expected. I received a note from “Michael,” who said he would be glad to tell me about being a donor. Michael’s last name sounded familiar, and when I asked him about it, he said that, yes, he was the son of Nobel prize–winning scientist
                                                      
                                                      
.

I was intrigued. How had a Nobelist’s son become a Nobel sperm bank donor? Michael was very cagey—living in his father’s shadow seemed to trouble him—but after much back-and-forth, he agreed to let me visit him in Dallas. He picked me up at the airport driving a wreck of a car. Michael was about fifty years old. He was tall and alarmingly gaunt: when he folded himself into the driver’s seat, he looked like a praying mantis. He spoke in a high-pitched, hesitating voice that immediately grated on me.

We drove back to his condo. His wife wasn’t home. He directed me to sit down in the living room. Except for small islands around the couch and TV, every inch of floor space was covered with flowering plants. Their perfume was almost overpowering.

Michael, I learned, was a man of little renown. It was not clear whether he had a job. He taught piano occasionally. But it was obvious within minutes of meeting him that Michael’s true calling was donating sperm. He referred to sperm donation, unironically, as “work.” As in “I continued to
work
for that fertility doctor, but I looked around for more
work.
” He was the only person I have ever heard of—outside the porn industry—who thought of masturbation as labor.

Michael didn’t mean that sperm donation was “work” in the sense that he did it to earn a living. All the banks except the Repository had paid him a little, but he would have done it for free. No, he called it “work” because it was the most productive activity in his life.

Michael said he’d gotten hooked on sperm donation in the mid-1970s when he’d read an article in
Playboy:
“You can be a sperm donor.” He had just finished his music degree and was living in the Northwest. He soon found plenty of “work.” “I started calling around to obstetricians and gynecologists until I found one who wanted me.” He had “worked” for the first doctor, then found others and started supplying them, too. (In those days, before large sperm banks were so popular, many doctors collected and distributed their own sperm.) As we talked, he ticked off his employers on his fingers. “Oh, there were probably half a dozen doctors I worked for, plus two or three sperm banks.” All in all, he had spent fifteen years masturbating. It had, he admitted, been exhausting.

Michael said he had volunteered himself to Robert Graham in the mid-1980s. Graham, though he had stopped recruiting actual laureates, was thrilled to add Michael’s second-generation Nobel genes to his bank. The Repository catalog hinted coyly at his Nobel heritage, describing an accomplished musician with an “outstanding history of achievement . . . in his family.” (Michael acknowledged what I had suspected: his father had been one of Graham’s three original Nobel donors, though he hadn’t stuck with it. Because the dad had quit, Graham might have been more eager to bank the son’s seed.)

Michael and his wife had no children of their own, but Michael’s eagerness to reproduce had not faded with age. The only reason he had stopped donating was that he was now so old that sperm banks wouldn’t accept him anymore. He tried to work around the age restriction. He recently learned that one sperm bank he had donated to was merely
storing
his sperm for the future, not distributing it to clients, so he pestered the bank to return the stored samples to him. He wanted to give away the samples himself. He placed ads in a local newspaper volunteering his sperm to lesbian couples and single women. He was hoping to find a woman who would let him stay in touch with the child. Not that he intended to financially support the kid or be a father—he just wanted to check in when it was convenient. When I wondered how many kids he had fathered, Michael stopped to pause and calculate. He guessed fifty, including fifteen through the Nobel sperm bank.

I asked him why he had spent the best years of his life donating sperm. Michael lit up. “When I heard about being a sperm donor, I thought, this is
great
! I am helping women. I am helping the human race because I have good genes. And I am passing on my genes.”

He leaned in, his voice urgent, his skeletal fingers pointing at me. “I have studied evolutionary biology, and
this
is what evolution is all about. Winning is passing on your genes, and losing is failing to do so. There are lots of games that men have made up, games where you win by scoring runs.” He paused, as if to emphasize the pointlessness of such games. “But the
main
game of the universe, the
only
game that matters, is the game of evolution, and you win by passing on genes. And I wanted to
win
!” He spoke this last sentence with a smug grin. It was just about the creepiest thing I have ever heard anyone say.

Sitting in his depressing condo, I looked at Michael and thought, You
are genetic victory
?

Michael, I realized glumly, was the living test of Robert Graham’s theory. He was the son of one of Graham’s original Nobel donors: in other words, exactly the kind of person Graham aspired to create. Michael was the finished product of Graham’s logic—blessed with allegedly magnificent Nobel genes. Yet all I saw in him was the fickleness of DNA: Here was a Nobel Prize baby, and he was no prize at all.

While I was talking to donors, I began to hear from parents with children by the Repository as well. The first to e-mail me were mothers who had read about Edward. I wrote about these mothers in
Slate,
and other parents saw those stories and contacted me, which led to more articles. Each story attracted another few parents and kids, until eventually I was in touch with two dozen families. The Internet did exactly what my editors and I had hoped: it allowed readers to collaborate with me to discover the lost history of the Repository.