The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  Finally I located the door marked “Cryobank” and walked into an uncomfortably cramped waiting room. A couple—not a young couple—was sitting there. They looked up, startled, when I entered. We half smiled uncomfortably at each other. All of us instantly recognized the awkward situation. They were there to buy sperm; I was there to sell it. We had each accidentally looked through a window into a world we did not want to see. I was sure the couple was thinking, That guy is a donor? The hell with this place, let’s go to Sperm World instead.

  I flagged down the receptionist, who assumed I was a customer, too. When I explained I was there to see Amanda about donating, she was chagrined. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I had apparently come in the wrong door. Amanda was summoned from her office and hustled me into the back, out of sight of the couple.

  Amanda led me to her office, a cozy place with wedding pictures and prints of sailing ships. She checked my driver’s license to make sure I was who I claimed to be. Then she pulled out my application and began reviewing it with me, line by line. In tone, it felt like a job interview with a vice president for human resources. In subject, it was rather different. “Okay, so you live in Washington, great. And your blood is B positive. You sure of that? No? That’s okay, we’ll check it. Hmm, so your family is from eastern Europe. Do you know exactly where? Can you check?” She noticed I was married and asked if my wife knew that I was there. I answered, “Of course. Don’t all wives know?”

  Amanda acted as though this was very funny and said, “A lot of donors are married and don’t tell their wives.” (And these are the guys you want to father children?)

  She asked me where I had gone to college. I said “Harvard.” She was delighted. She continued, “And have you done some graduate work?” I said no. She looked disappointed. “But surely you are planning to do some graduate work?” Again I said no. She was deflated and told me why. Fairfax has something it calls—I’m not kidding—its “doctorate program.” For a premium, mothers can buy sperm from donors who have doctoral degrees or are pursuing them. What counts as a doctor? I asked. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, optometry, law (lawyers are doctors? yes—the “juris doctorate”), and chiropractic. Don’t say you weren’t warned: your premium “doctoral” sperm may have come from a student chiropractor.

  After a few minutes discussing the application, my attention wandered. I gazed absently at Amanda’s screen saver, a soothing blue-and-white pattern just over her shoulder. After a few seconds, I noticed that the white pattern wasn’t a pattern. It was a school of tiny sperm, tails waving jauntily as they motored across the screen. I took a second look at the mouse paperweight on Amanda’s desk. It wasn’t a mouse. It was a cute little sperm.

  Such goofiness was, I came to discover, a hallmark of modern sperm banks. Fairfax hands out pens on college campuses that ask, “Why not get paid for it?” When I visited California Cryobank, the director of public relations gave me a T-shirt depicting swimming sperm. Around the sperm ran a circle of text that read “Future People” in a dozen different languages. California Cryobank distributes pens, too. They’re floaty pens, with a little plastic sperm swimming up and down, up and down.

  Anyway, back to Amanda. At this point I am obliged to point out that Amanda was cute. In fact, she was distractingly cute. She was thirty, I’d guess, and looked Latina. She smiled all the time, a sexy, gleaming smile, and laughed when I made even the lamest stab at a joke. She leaned across her desk toward me as we talked.

  Rule number one of sperm banking: The people who recruit donors are invariably women, and they are invariably good-looking. I suspect—no, I am sure—that this is deliberate, to get donors excited to join the Fairfax team.

  Yet Amanda’s sexiness presented a kind of paradox. The chief activity of the sperm bank—its entire purpose—is masturbation. But my interview with Amanda was actually designed to desexualize what I would be doing. The goal of the interview seemed to be to eliminate the embarrassment that men feel about masturbation by replacing it with tedium. After the endless review of my application, Amanda walked me step by countless step through the qualification process—if my sperm count was above such-and-such a number, I would make the next round. There would be blood tests for gonorrhea, syphilis, hepatitis, and lots of scary diseases I had never heard of. They would give me a renal ultrasound. My sperm would again be counted, frozen, thawed, and recounted. Its motility—how well it swims—would be tested and retested. Only then would I finally be admitted as a donor—and even that was contingent on passing regular blood tests. Amanda then listed what I would be required to supply to the bank if I qualified: baby photos, an audio CD about myself, essays on such topics as “What is your most memorable childhood experience?” and “What is the funniest thing that ever happened to you?”

  After that, Amanda held forth enthusiastically and at great length about money. “You will get paid $50 per usable specimen, for starters. Then you will get $5 for every vial from the specimen. The average is ten to fourteen vials per specimen. When a vial is released from quarantine after six months, you will get another $5. So the average payment is $209 per deposit.” She paused. “Now, this is ordinary income, but we don’t do withholding. We send checks twice a month, but later we will just give you a check every six months. We will send you a 1099 form at the end of the year.”

  Amanda had managed to take a mysterious and sexual and profound process and make it sound exactly like . . . a job. I considered asking her about the 401(k) and dental benefits.

  Finally, it was time for the money shot. She led me next door to the lab, where three women in lab coats were chatting about their weekends while gazing at sperm samples under microscopes. They ignored me. When I became a regular donor, Amanda said, I would come straight to the lab to collect a sterile cup and a labeling sticker. She handed me a cup. Amanda pointed to a small incubator—a warm metal box—where I would put the “specimen” when I was done. Next to the incubator was a pile of plastic sachets; they looked like the mustard packets you get with a deli sandwich. “That’s KY jelly,” she said. “It’s nontoxic for sperm. Still, just try not to get it, you know, on the sample.”

  Amanda escorted me back down the hall to a donor room. Fairfax has two of these—sometimes known in the trade as “blue rooms” or “masturbatoriums.” The room was really no more than a large closet. A dingy beige love seat was pushed against the far wall. An erotic print hung on the wall above the sofa. It was a painting of a woman from behind; she was wearing some diaphanous lingerie. It was pretty sexy, to be honest. On another wall were a clock, a sink, and a cabinet. Amanda handed me a pen and told me to write the time of ejaculation on the cup when I was done. She turned on the taps and instructed, “Wash your hands with this antibacterial soap, and dry them well. Water is toxic for semen.”

  “Here’s the exhaust fan.” She flipped a switch by the door, and a buzzing noise covered the room. She opened the cabinet again. “And here are the magazines.” She handed me a stack of High Societys, Gallerys, and Playboys, all, shall we say, well thumbed. “Fairfax Cryobank” was scrawled on the cover of each of the porno mags. Amanda, who did this routine several times a day, seemed unfazed. It was just a commercial transaction for her. I pretended I was unfazed, too.

  She gave me the phone number for the chief lab technician and told me to call the next day to find out whether I had a high enough sperm count and whether my guys had survived freezing and thawing. “Now, of one hundred men who apply,” she said reassuringly, “we only interview twenty or thirty. And the vast majority of those—even men who have their own children already—end up being disqualified by sperm count. So don’t feel bad if you don’t make it.” She thanked me for coming in. She flashed me one more gleaming, sexy smile, closed the door, and locked it from the outside.

  The next few minutes passed as you would expect and are none of your business.

  When I was done, I walked my cup down the hall to the incubator. I tried to catch the eye of one of the technic
ians, to ask if I could take a sperm paperweight as a souvenir. None of them looked at me.

  The next morning, I called the chief lab technician. “I was about to call you,” she said. “I have some good news. You passed the freezing and thawing. We want to make arrangements for your second trial specimen—that is, if you are still interested.”

  I flushed. I couldn’t resist asking “So what were my numbers? What was the count?”

  “Your count was about 105 million per milliliter. The usual is around fifty to sixty million. So you are well above average.”

  I grinned—105 million! I considered breaking my promise to Hanna, and continuing as a donor. I was, after all, “well above average.” I started to make an appointment for my second deposit, then thought better of it. Hanna was right: Who knew what they were doing with my sperm? The longer I kept up the charade, the greater the possibility that my sperm would end up in the wrong hands (or wrong uterus). So I told the tech I needed to check my schedule and would call back. I didn’t call back. She phoned me again a few days later and left a vague message. I didn’t return it.

  I was not much closer to wanting to be a donor than I had been before I started, but I was closer to understanding why someone else might want to do it. In the abstract, donating sperm had seemed fundamentally silly. But actually doing it was seductive. I had been accepted by the ultraexclusive Fairfax Cryobank! My sperm was “well above average”! My count was 105 million! What’s yours, George Clooney? Amanda, lovely Amanda, had asked for my help. The women of America—barren, desolate, desperate—needed me. They yearned for my B-positive, brown-eyed, six-foot-one-inch, HIV-negative, drug-free, heart-attack-prone, only slightly mentally ill sperm. And what kind of selfish monster was I to deny it to them?

  From the vantage point of today’s fertility-crazed America, where people talk about their fertility specialists the way they used to talk about their plumbers, where every woman is either making a baby through in vitro fertilization, donating an egg so someone else can, carrying a surrogate baby for her daughter or mother or rich neighbor, or seeking to adopt her lesbian partner’s hormone-spawned sperm-bank triplets, where getting pregnant the old-fashioned way seems not merely old-fashioned but slightly foolish, it can be hard to remember that infertility used to be a badge of shame, that the only fertility choice women used to have was “Blue eyes for the donor or brown?” and that they were supposed to be grateful even for that. The most important thing—and arguably the best thing—Robert Graham’s genius sperm bank did was to transform how Americans thought about making babies.

  Today, sperm banking is a business with “customers” instead of “patients,” marketing plans instead of doctor’s orders, professional donors instead of Johnny-on-the-spot medical students. None of this was true when Robert Graham started the Repository. Sperm banking—and American fertility in general—experienced a revolution, and Robert Graham was a most unlikely Thomas Jefferson.

  To understand how sperm banks got the way they are today, you have to start with a very short article in the April 1909 issue of the journal Medical World. The article was titled “Artificial Impregnation.” The author was an obscure Minnesota doctor named Addison Davis Hard.

  Hard wrote that twenty-five years earlier, he had witnessed a medical procedure so bizarre and so shocking that everyone who knew about it had taken an oath never to reveal what they saw. But the time had come, Hard said, for him to break the oath. In 1884, Hard continued, he had been a student of Dr. William Pancoast at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. Pancoast was a professor of surgery, a former Civil War doctor who was just wrapping up a fine though unremarkable academic career. A wealthy Philadelphia businessman consulted Pancoast to learn why his wife wasn’t getting pregnant. Pancoast examined the wife thoroughly—it being the nineteenth-century (and twentieth-century, and twenty-first-century) assumption that if something was wrong it must be the woman’s fault—and found nothing amiss. The husband, too, showed no obvious “physical defect,” but Pancoast collected a semen sample just in case. He plugged it under the microscope: there were no sperm at all. Pancoast diagnosed the husband’s sterility as the result of a youthful bout of gonorrhea. Pancoast was confident he could treat the problem and restore the husband’s fertility. But when the businessman and his wife returned to Sansom Street Hospital two months later for the follow-up appointment, there was no change in the husband’s condition. Pancoast told his students that the merchant was a lost cause: his seminal ducts were permanently blocked.

  But then, eureka! According to Hard’s account, “A joking remark by one of the class, ‘The only solution of this problem is to call in the hired man,’ was the probable incentive to the plan of action which followed.”

  Pancoast, without telling the husband or wife what he was going to do, knocked the woman unconscious with chloroform. The six students decided who was the “best-looking” man in the class, and the winner obligingly provided a sperm sample. Pancoast placed the semen in a hard rubber syringe and squeezed it into the unconscious woman’s uterus. She woke up none the wiser. Later, Pancoast did deign to explain the insemination to the husband, who was “delighted with the idea,” Hard reported. The husband and Pancoast then conspired to keep the secret from the wife, who soon found herself happily pregnant. This was the first recorded use of a sperm donor and probably the first use of a sperm donor, period.

  In due course, a son was born. Remarkably, Hard said, he looked very like “the willing but impossible father.” The boy, Hard added from the perspective of 1909, “is now a business man of the city of New York, and I have shaken hands with him within the past year.” (Why would Hard, a Minnesota doctor, have any reason to meet a young New York businessman? As A. T. Gregoire and Robert C. Mayer speculated sixty years later, Hard had no reason—unless of course he was that “best-looking member of the class,” and thus the boy’s father.)

  Hard wrote that he was breaking his secrecy vow because Pancoast was dead and because he himself had concluded that donor insemination was a wonderful idea—a necessary eugenic remedy for a troubled nation. Too many men were secretly infected with gonorrhea, so babies needed protection from the “satanic germs” of their fathers. “Artificial impregnation” was the remedy. (“Go ask the blind children whose eyes were saturated with gonorrheal pus as they struggled thru the birth canal to emerge into this world of darkness to endure a living death; ask them” if they object to artificial impregnation, he wrote.)

  It wouldn’t matter which man supplied the seed, Hard concluded with the certainty of true ignorance, because the child was shaped entirely by the mother. The father made no contribution at all: “It may at first shock the delicate sensibilities of the sentimental who consider that the source of the seed indicated the true father, but when the scientific fact becomes known that the origin of the spermatozoa which generates the ovum is of no more importance than the personality of the finger which pulls the trigger of a gun, then objections will lose their forcefulness, and artificial impregnation will become recognized as a race-uplifting procedure.”

  I linger on the first donor insemination because it so perfectly prefigured the whole sorry history of sperm donation. From day one—from ejaculation one in Sansom Street Hospital in 1884—sperm donation has been characterized by its abundance of secrecy, embarrassment, deception, and ignorance. Hard’s article encapsulated the business to come, all themes struck: the authoritarian fertility doctor making it up as he went along and issuing awesome decisions casually (“Call in the hired man”) . . . the wife ignorant and unconscious, literally a mere vessel . . . the husband a coconspirator, lying to protect his own ego . . . the careless medical student, donating sperm without a thought to the consequences . . . the self-justifying scientific hoo-hah masquerading as empirical fact.

  Artificial insemination is an elementary medical procedure—you can do it competently in your own home, after a few minutes’ training—so why wasn’t it practiced regularly until the twentieth
century? One reason is that it took a long time for people to understand what sperm was or why it mattered, as Gina Maranto explains in Quest for Perfection. Until the seventeenth century, Maranto says, the male and female reproductive capacities were black boxes. Scientists knew about semen (obviously), but they couldn’t figure out what the milky fluid had to do with reproduction. Some hypothesized that male semen mixed with a “female semen” in the uterus to form a child. Others guessed that semen fertilized menstrual blood. Finally, in 1677, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the Dutch inventor of the microscope, spotted sperm cells swimming in seminal fluid.

  At first, sperm only confused matters. Another Dutch microscopist, Nicolaus Hartsoeker, speculated that a perfectly formed human being was curled inside the head of each sperm cell. These tiny men were dubbed “homunculi,” and they became the foundation of a bizarre theory called “spermism.” Spermism was a variation of the already popular notion of “preformation,” which held that fully formed people already existed, microscopically, in their parents. Taken to its logical conclusion, preformation said that if your teeny son is housed in you, then your even teenier grandson is housed in him, and so on for N generations, till the end of time. We were God’s own Russian nesting dolls. Until Hartsoeker, most preformationists had been matriarchal; these “ovists” believed that God had deposited us in the maternal eggs. (Therefore, Eve had held all of mankind to come, like some gigantic warehouse.) The homunculus flipped the attention to men, contending that humans came from sperm, and women were merely pots to plant in. The spermists and the ovists bickered for 150 years until they were both proven wrong. In the late eighteenth century, the Italian Lazzaro Spallanzani, performing what may have been the first artificial inseminations, showed that frogs and dogs couldn’t get pregnant without contributions from both males and females. Then, in 1827, the mammalian egg was finally discovered. In the nineteenth century, European scientists ran experiments on animals, tinkering with sperm and eggs, eggs and sperm, and concluded, at long last, that each was useless without the other.