The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  When I had started trolling for the kids, mothers, and donors, I had assumed the traditional, self-serving role of the journalist: I was going to use them to tell the real history of the Nobel sperm bank. But instead, I discovered that my sources wanted to use me. They had reversed me. They put me to work for them. Mothers asked me to hunt for their donors. Kids asked me to hunt for their fathers and half siblings. Donors asked me to hunt for their kids. It wasn’t journalism anymore. I became—through unique access to information, through moral obligation, and through my own curiosity—the Semen Detective.

  CHAPTER 4

  DONOR CORAL

  I returned from my California visit with Lorraine to find a cryptic message on my voice mail. It was a boy with a slow, gravelly voice. He said he needed to talk to me, but he didn’t leave a number. He didn’t leave a name, either—or rather he left two names, first “John,” then “Tom.” They both sounded fake. Then I saw this in my e-mail inbox:

  I dont want my real name revealed through this just call me Goldie its a nickname i have kept for a while among friends. about one week ago my mother informed me that my half-sister and i were both one of the 230 who were born through artificial insemination and the Repository for Germinal Choice. I am searching for the papers that we have showing the “color” of the donor, when i find them i will email you again, until that time the only information that i have about my father is that he was one of the few nobel prize winners who gave sperm, if you could give me a list of possible nobel prize winners who could have been the ones who donated, i would be much appreciative. Then when i find the papers i will tell you the color of my sister and my fathers and you can do whatever you do with them. Thank you for all your assistance as i know you will help in any way possible.

  —Goldie

  The e-mail fascinated me. “Goldie” was the first Repository kid who had reached me on his (or her?) own. Some of the Repository moms had let me e-mail with their children, but those exchanges had been dreary. The kids had been all preteens: they’d had nothing to say, and their moms had clearly been lurking, making sure they didn’t write anything interesting. But Goldie was a kid who sounded like a kid, all bad grammar and enthusiasm.

  I figured “Goldie” and “Tom” and “John” were all the same person. The voice mail and the e-mail shared a scattered, frantic eagerness. I e-mailed a reply to Goldie with lots of questions: Are you a boy or a girl? How old are you? Where do you live? Are you the kid who left me a voice mail? Because he had asked for the names of Nobelists, I sent him a Web page that listed laureates, but I also warned him about what Edward Burnham had told me, that Graham had stopped recruiting Nobelists very early. I added, gently, that perhaps he should lower his hopes, because as far as I could tell, there had not been any Nobel Prize donors after the initial batch of three. I asked Goldie if we could talk on the phone.

  He quickly e-mailed a reply. He said that, yes, he had left the cryptic voice mail, and his real name was Tom Legare. He said he lived in a suburb of Kansas City. He had just learned that he was a child of the Nobel sperm bank, and he had come across my articles in a Web search. He said he suspected that Jonas Salk could be his dad. Salk wasn’t a Nobelist, Tom realized, but he had seen Salk’s name on the Repository stationery in his mom’s files.

  He gave his phone number. I called it and asked for his mom, Mary. I wanted her permission before I spoke to Tom, who was still a minor. Mary said she wouldn’t normally talk about the Repository with a stranger, but she figured that it would be worth telling the story if I could help Tom find his dad. I prodded her with questions. I asked if she had wanted a superkid. I wondered how Graham’s exotic sperm had made its way to an obscure midwestern suburb. Mary wasn’t like the other Repository moms I had talked to. She didn’t live in some swank Los Angeles home; she had spent her entire life in suburban Missouri. She wasn’t a doctor or nurse or psychologist. She had started in the working class, and, only now, thanks to decades of hard work, had she clawed her family into the middle class.

  Mary was in her early forties. She said she had gotten a bad start. She had married at nineteen. Her husband, Alvin, was a Vietnam vet whose work history had been spotty. Finally, he had found work that suited him, in sales. But he was on the road, away from the family for weeks at a time. But Mary was a striver. She’d begun as a secretary at the local insurance company. The company had paid for her associate’s degree, then a bachelor’s in computer science. She’d inched her way up the career ladder. Now she did tech support for the firm and taught computer classes part-time at the local community college. She owned a nice house. She was doing well.

  Mary had stumbled onto the Repository, she said. After seven years of marriage, she couldn’t get pregnant. Alvin told her he had been kicked in the testicles in Vietnam—maybe that was the problem. It was 1984: there was no way to fix him, certainly no way they could afford. His doctor suggested the Repository. Mary had never heard of it, but she immediately decided a Nobel sperm bank was a tremendous idea. She was a self-improver: What bigger kick up the ladder could there be for her kids than exchanging her husband’s mediocre genes for a Nobel Prize winner’s? She was pretty sure the bank had told her that her donor was a Nobel laureate, but even if he wasn’t a Nobelist, he was surely better than Alvin. The $500 deposit for the liquid-nitrogen tank had been a ton of money for her back then, but she hadn’t hesitated. She’d conceived Tom almost immediately and given birth to him in 1985. When she’d returned for a second child a couple years later, the bank had run out of sperm from Tom’s donor, so Mary had chosen a different donor, and that had produced her daughter, Jessica. Mary told me she had raised the kids by herself. She and Alvin hadn’t divorced, but his chief contribution to parenting was to watch TV with the kids once in a while. She was a bullying mother, she proclaimed cheerfully. Jessica had been enrolled in dance classes as soon as she could walk. She nagged Tom and Jessica because they were not as driven as she was. If Tom brought home a C, God forbid, she wondered why it wasn’t a B. If it became a B, she hectored, why not an A?

  As they grew up, Mary had guarded their secret as if it were a treasure. She loved romance novels. She had even written one when Tom was little and still dreamed of finding a publisher for it. From romances, perhaps, she had learned the value of a secret revealed at just the right time. Wait—that handsome roughneck with a heart of gold who saved that little girl from drowning in quicksand, that’s really multimillionaire businessman Lance Stone?!? She had waited patiently to spring the news on her kids: You’re not who you think you are! You are a Nobel Baby! She planned to strike a well-timed blow that would change their lives forever.

  The moment had just come for Tom, she said, because he had been taunting her with talk of pro wrestling school. It was time Tom knew he was not doomed to become a wastrel. He needed to understand that his genes said—perhaps even dictated—that he could become great.

  Mary gave me permission to talk to Tom, so I called him the next night. For a while I just listened to him riff about his life. I had to strain to hear at first—his voice was so mumbly—but I soon realized he was funny and self-mocking. I especially liked how easily he rose to indignation at his mom and dad (antiparental indignation being the existential state of the fifteen-year-old boy). Wrestling school, he sneered in his mom’s direction, that was a joke. Didn’t she realize he was planning to go to college and wrestling school at the same time? Didn’t she realize that what he really cared about was rap, not wrestling? He said he had a band called Infernal. He wrote all the lyrics. He also kept saying “ICP” this and “ICP” that, and I had no idea what he was talking about until I remembered—some neurons firing in the deep reptilian corner of my brain that still read Rolling Stone—that there was a band called Insane Clown Posse—a hard-core white rap group. Its music is a dog whistle tuned to the testosterone-addled frequency of the overdramatic teenage white boy. Tom just loved Insane Clown Posse. Tom also said he played a ton of video games, particularly first-perso
n shooters like Halo. He said he was a Wiccan.

  Tom told me he had gotten into trouble at school because he had written a song about suicide. The song was antisuicide—a friend of his had been suicidal and the song had been a wake-up call—but someone had narced him to the principal because Tom’s lyrics mentioned Columbine. The principal had called the cops. The cops had wanted to know if Tom was planning to shoot up the school. They’d said they were going to arrest him, but instead they’d just sent a file on him to state police headquarters and given him a warning. Now some of the teachers were looking at him funny and had said he better not try anything in class, and it was all because some idiot couldn’t understand that these were just song lyrics and that the lyrics said the opposite of what the principal thought they did.

  Grudgingly, Tom talked about classes. He said he managed a 3.6 GPA but didn’t try. He was a sophomore, but he was already taking courses at the community college. By the time he graduated high school, he would be most of the way to a junior college degree.

  Finally I asked him about the sperm bank. He had known about it for a couple weeks by then, and he was still perplexed, toggling between amazement and annoyance. He kept saying, “It’s so science fiction”—which was praise coming from Tom. But in the next breath he might denounce it as a “Nazi” project because, as he had learned, all the donors had been white and lesbians hadn’t been allowed to apply.

  Tom told me how delighted he was to be free of his dad, Alvin—“not the most attractive character,” he said dryly—but he still didn’t know what to think of his new, nameless, long-gone biological dad.

  Mostly he raged at his mom. He hated that she had kept the secret so long. He hated that she had misinformed him that his donor was definitely a Nobelist. He hated that she couldn’t find any of her Repository records. He hated it even more that when Tom himself had managed to find the records, she couldn’t remember which guy was his dad.

  Tom said he felt like he was worse off than he was before he knew the truth. “At first when she said it was a Nobel Prize winner, I figured there weren’t that many, and I would be able to find him. But if it’s not a Nobel Prize winner, if it could be anyone, then I will never find him. And so now I have no father. My father—my mom’s husband—isn’t my father. My real father—the donor—isn’t my father because all he did was donate sperm, which is not enough to make him a father. So nobody is my father.”

  As we ended the phone call, I promised Tom I would do what I could to help but that I wouldn’t be able to discover anything without the donor’s color ID. I had realized by then that the color code was the key to matching kids with donors. Tom and Mary put their heads together again and re-examined the donor catalog. Looking a second time, Mary suddenly remembered: maybe it had been Donor Green. He was a “Professor of a hard science at a major university and already one of the most eminent men in his field.” His IQ had been measured over 200 as a child. He had “extraordinary powers of concentration,” “seldom loses his temper,” and “enjoys playing with children, folk dancing, and linguistics.” Mary suspected that Jessica’s donor had been Turquoise (“a top science professor at a major university, head of a large research lab . . . a professional musician”). She and Tom asked me how they could confirm her suspicions.

  I suggested that Mary contact Marta Graham, Robert Graham’s widow, who might have kept the records when the bank closed in 1999. Perhaps Marta could confirm which donor Mary had used. I found a phone number for Marta Graham, and Mary called her. Mary explained that she believed that telling her son something about his donor might inspire him to do better in school. But Marta Graham said she couldn’t help, because she didn’t have the records. Mary eventually located the person who did have the records, a San Diego woman named Hazel. Mary wrote Hazel a letter asking for the donor code names. Finally, in summer 2001, six months after Tom and I first talked, Hazel mailed an answer. Mary had misremembered. Jessica’s donor hadn’t been Turquoise; it had been Fuchsia, the Olympic gold medalist, who was also the father of Lorraine’s three kids. Jessica didn’t know the secret yet, so Mary just filed Fuchsia’s code name away.

  The second surprise from Hazel: Tom’s father was not Donor Green. It was Donor Coral. Mary and Tom were thrilled to have the name, or at least the code name. According to their catalog, Coral was a gem: “A professional man of very high standing in his science, has had a book published.” His IQ had been tested at 160 at age nine. His hobbies were “writing, family, reading, chess and piano proficiently.” He was described as good-looking, happy, easygoing, extroverted, and wonderful with kids. His health was superb. He excelled at all sports. He came from a large family of “high achievers.” And he was young, born in the 1950s. That birthday ruled out the elderly Jonas Salk, but Tom didn’t care. Coral sounded perfect—even better than Salk.

  Now that he had learned something about his “real dad” (as Tom was now calling Coral), Tom told his dad, Alvin, that he knew the secret. He wanted to see how Alvin responded. But the conversation was an anticlimax. His dad responded with his usual sullen indifference. They didn’t talk about it again.

  Giddy on Coral, Tom also broke his promise and revealed the secret to his sister. Jessica was less shaken than Tom had been to discover she was a genius sperm bank product. She was also less surprised. She was generally hard to faze. Her relationship with Alvin had soured, too, so she was glad to know he wasn’t a blood relative. But she didn’t feel the same compulsion as Tom to search for her donor dad. She was only a little curious about Donor Fuchsia. She wondered how old he was and what sport he played, but that was it. The void didn’t bug her. Mostly she was happy because learning the secret brought her close to Tom again. Oddly, discovering that they were less related by blood—they shared only one parent, not two—made them feel more like brother and sister. They’d barely talked in years, but suddenly they were friends again.

  Tom called me with the Coral news. He told me his image of what Coral might be like: “I think he’s a writer. He probably lives in California. He is probably married and has kids of his own.”

  He asked me to help him keep looking for Coral. “I just want to see what he looks like, to find out what he did with his life, and maybe to talk to him, just once. I don’t know whether I want to tell him, ‘How dare you! How could you have done that?’ or tell him, ‘Good job, thanks.’ I won’t know till I see him.”

  Tom also wondered if I could find any Coral siblings. He would love to have sisters and brothers. He asked if I had been contacted by any other Coral kids.

  In fact, I told Tom, I already knew his brother. He was fourteen. He lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His name was Alton Grant.

  I had heard from Samantha Grant, Alton Grant’s mother, six months earlier, right about the time I had first talked to Tom and Mary. Samantha was one of the first mothers who had contacted me. It happened in a roundabout way. First I had received a mysterious e-mail from someone claiming that she knew a Repository family. A few days later, a woman left a vague message on my voice mail, but with no name or call-back number. Soon after that, Samantha sent me an e-mail:

  You know me in several guises already that you may think are independent. Confidentiality is a serious issue and so I have approached you cautiously, from different directions, to test the waters. I am ready to talk with you, and perhaps meet with you.

  I e-mailed her back. She said her niece had sent the first e-mail, feeling me out on Samantha’s behalf. Samantha and I arranged a time to speak. I liked her immediately. She was a chief engineer at a Boston high-tech company, and she was smart as hell. Samantha had grown up in a place—the rural Midwest—where smart girls were viewed with suspicion. Samantha had accepted the cost of this—being viewed as odd by narrow-minded people—rather than rein in her brain. She reminded me a little of my mother, who’s an English professor. My mom’s a generation older than Samantha, but they’re both endlessly curious women who are intellectual without being the least bit snobbish.
Samantha had the rare gift of being able to explain difficult ideas clearly and the even rarer gift of believing that those ideas should be taken seriously, argued, and celebrated. Samantha knew that I knew nothing about her field—a particularly challenging branch of engineering—but that never stopped her from describing her work to me and never stopped me from enjoying it when she did. She told a story well and she was very funny. She started with a belief in the goodness of all souls, but when someone exposed himself as an ass or a monster, her tongue was acid.

  Samantha was fiercely protective of both her own privacy and her son’s. Our first conversation, before she would reveal a jot of information, was a negotiation about privacy.

  Finally, she told me her story. It started in the mid-1980s. “I wanted a child, but my then-husband had had a vasectomy.” At first, she asked a friend of a friend if he’d be willing to donate sperm to her. He lived overseas, had kids of his own, and would stay out of Samantha’s life. But she scrapped that plan, because the “known” donor proved too emotionally entangling. Then Samantha read an article in the Los Angeles Times about the Repository for Germinal Choice. Her inner nerd loved the idea of a genius sperm bank. She was smart, she’d always been smart, and she wanted a smart kid. She thought that she understood how to raise a smart child, but that she would have no idea how to raise a jock or a beauty queen. Samantha was the only Repository mom I talked to who was not afraid of genius, perhaps because she had so much of it herself. “I can’t understand why anyone would think it is bad to want to have a bright child.”

  She ordered the Repository catalog in early 1985. Lots of donors tempted her, but it came down to a choice between Coral and Light Green. She couldn’t make up her mind. She was living in California then, so she drove down to the Repository office in Escondido. The Repository office manager, Julianna McKillop, sold her on Coral. Julianna told Samantha that Donor Coral was happy. She said he was highly accomplished in mathematics. The engineer in Samantha liked that. Julianna said Coral’s sister was a world-class pianist. Samantha, who’d almost become a professional violinist, was delighted. Julianna said Coral’s parents were wonderful people. She said he loved children and had three children of his own. She said he was a head turner. Then Julianna pulled out a picture of Coral and showed it to Samantha. He was bright-eyed, floppy-haired, and cute. “That sealed it. Everything I heard, I liked.”