The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  Thanks to its attentiveness to consumers, the Repository upended the hierarchy of the fertility industry. Before the Repository, fertility doctors had ordered, women had accepted. Graham cut the doctors out of the loop and sold directly to the consumer. Graham disapproved of the women’s movement and even banned unmarried women from using his bank, yet he became an inadvertent feminist pioneer. Women were entranced. Mother after mother said the same thing to me: she had picked the Repository because it was the only place that let her select what she wanted.

  Where Graham went, other sperm banks—and the rest of the fertility industry—followed. California Cryobank, Xytex, Fairfax Cryobank, and the other major sperm banks started expanding their donor descriptions from a few lines to dozens of pages and recruiting the most gifted men they could find. Today, American sperm banks are heirs of the Repository for Germinal Choice, though they don’t like to acknowledge its influence. To see the world Graham helped make, I paid a visit to Steve Broder at the California Cryobank, probably the world’s leading sperm bank. Broder is a founding father of modern sperm banking. He was the technician who helped Graham collect sperm from Nobel Prize winners in the late 1970s. Later, he went on to cofound California Cryobank, where he was director of quality assurance. Broder was tall and lean. He was fiftyish and young-looking, except for gray hair brushed up in a style oddly reminiscent of Robert Graham’s. Broder seemed good-natured but exacting, a characteristic you’d hope to find in a sperm bank’s director of quality assurance.

  Unlike most other sperm bankers, Broder acknowledges his debt to Graham. When the Nobel sperm bank opened in 1980, Broder said, it changed everything. “At the time, the California Cryobank had one line about a donor: height, weight, eye color, blood typing, ethnic group, college major. But when we saw what Graham was doing, how much information about the donor he put on a single page, we decided to do the same.”

  Other sperm banks, recognizing that they were in a consumer business, were soon publicizing their ultrahigh safety standards, rigorous testing of donors, and choice, choice, choice. This is the model that guides all sperm banks today.

  Broder gave me a tour through California Cryobank, a low-slung redbrick building right next to the UCLA campus in Westwood. It also has offices in Palo Alto, right by Stanford, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, within walking distance from MIT and Harvard. The locations are conscious strategy. California Cryobank realized that women wanted smart donors, so it went where the smartest boys were. Broder guided me through the back offices, past the five masturbatoriums. The door to one opened, and a slouchy, goateed twenty-year-old emerged holding a little cup.

  We stopped at the lab, where the equipment and methods remained much the same as twenty years ago, Broder said. A white-coated technician invited me over to look into his microscope. He was counting sperm. His viewing field was divided up into a grid of squares. Each time he saw a spermatozoon in one of the squares, he clicked a counter. If he registered seventy-five live sperm in ten squares, the sample passed. That translated into a somewhat-above-average sperm count.

  After the count, the techs mixed in cryoprotectant, the same formula of egg yolk, salt solution, and glycerol that’s been used for decades. The sample was also processed to remove white blood cells, damaged sperm, and other material in semen that might interfere with insemination. Eventually, the mixture was pipetted into vials, each containing at least 10 million motile sperm. One ejaculation produced anywhere from three to thirty vials. The vials were threaded into metal straws and eventually transferred to the bank’s liquid-nitrogen storage tanks, each of which holds 20,000 shots. More than six months later, the vials would be sold for $275 each. California Cryobank, like other major banks, uses only sperm collected on-site. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the American Association of Tissue Banks—the two trade groups that monitor sperm banks—strongly discourage allowing donors to collect and process their sperm at home. Processing the sperm in a lab improves its quality and ensures a reliable chain of custody. The bank can be sure the sperm came from the proper donor. (The Repository had permitted its donors to process their own sperm at home.* 3)

  As the tech explained the storage process to me, a minidrama played out at the front desk. The slouchy, goateed donor was annoyed. The receptionist—a pretty young woman, natch—was gently admonishing him that his new sample didn’t make the grade and that maybe he should try abstaining longer. “Well, do I get paid anyway?” Slouchy asked. “We can’t pay you for a sample we can’t use,” she replied. “But I can give you free movie passes.” She handed him a pair of tickets. The exchange felt like something out of a surrealist movie: Your masturbation is a failure. Here, have some movie tickets.

  The consumer revolution in fertility has made the banks’ job incredibly difficult. Imagine how picky you are when you shop for a CD player. Now suppose you expected the CD player to last eighty-seven years, occupy its own room in your house, get married, have children, and take care of you in your old age. You’d be pretty choosy, too. Sperm banks have to cater to that finickiness, or they fail. At the major banks, the attentiveness to consumer demand has reached extraordinary levels. Broder showed me how a prospective mom might shop for Donor Right at California Cryobank. He began by handing me the basic catalog, a three-page listing of all the current donors. The catalog is also online, which is where most customers view it. With two hundred–plus men available, California Cryobank probably has the world’s largest selection. It dwarfs the Repository, which never had more than a dozen donors at once. California Cryobank produces more pregnancies in a single month than the Repository did in nineteen years. Other sperm banks range from 150-plus donors to only half a dozen.

  In the basic catalog, donors are coded by ethnicity, blood type, hair color and texture, eye color, and college major or occupation. Searching for an Armenian international businessman? How about Mr. 3291? Or an Italian-French filmmaker, your own little Truffaullini? Try Mr. 5269.

  But the basic catalog is just a start. For $12, you can see the “long profile” of any donor—his twenty-six-page handwritten application. Fifteen bucks more gets you the results of a psychological test called the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. Another $25 buys a baby photo. Yet another $25, and you can listen to an audio interview. Still more, and you can read the notes that Cryobank staff members took when they met the donor. For $50, a bank employee will even select the donor who looks most like your husband.

  To get a sense of what this man-shopping feels like, I asked Broder if I could see a complete donor package. Broder gave me the entire folder for Donor 3498. I began with the baby photo. In it, 3498 was dark blond and cute, arms flung open to the world. At the bottom, where a parent would write, “Jimmy at his second birthday party,” the Cryobank had printed, “3498.” I leafed through 3498’s handwritten application. His writing was fast and messy. He was twenty-six years old, of Spanish and English descent. His eyes were blue-gray, hair brown, blood B-positive. He was tall, of course. (California Cryobank rarely accepts anyone under five feet, nine inches tall.)

  Donor 3498 had been a college philosophy major, with a 3.5 GPA, and he had earned a Master of Fine Arts graduate degree. He spoke basic Thai. “I was a national youth chess champion, and I have written a novel.” His favorite food was pasta. He worked as a freelance journalist (I wondered if I knew him). He said his favorite color was black, wryly adding, “which I am told is technically not a color.” He described himself as “highly self-motivated, obsessive about writing and learning and travel. . . . My greatest flaw is impatience.” His life goal was to become a famous novelist. His SAT scores were 1270, but he noted that he got that score when he was only twelve years old, the only time he took the test. He suffered from hay fever; his dad had high blood pressure. Otherwise, the family had no serious health problems. Both parents were lawyers. His mom was “assertive,” “controlling,” and “optimistic”; his dad was “assertive” and “easygoing.”

  I checked 34
98’s Keirsey Temperament Sorter. He was classified as an “idealist” and a “Champion.” Champions “see life as an exciting drama, pregnant with possibilities for both good and evil. . . . Fiercely individualistic, Champions strive toward a kind of personal authenticity. . . . Champions are positive exuberant people.”

  I played 3498’s audio interview. He sounded serious, intense, extremely smart. I could hear that he clicked his lips together before every sentence. He clearly loved his sister—“a pretty amazing, vivacious woman”—but didn’t think much of his younger brother, whom he dismissed as “less serious.” He did indeed seem to be an idealist: “I’d like to be involved in the establishment of an alternative living community, one that is agriculturally oriented.”

  By then I felt I knew 3498, and that was the point. I knew more about him than I had known about most girls I dated in high school and college. I knew more about his health than I knew about my wife’s or even my own. Unfortunately, I didn’t really like him. His seriousness seemed oppressive: I disliked the way he put down his brother. He sounded rigid and chilly. If I were shopping for a husband, he wouldn’t be it, and if I were shopping for a sperm donor, he wouldn’t be it, either. And that was fine. I thought about it in economic terms: If I were a customer, I would have dropped only a hundred bucks on 3498, which is no more than a couple of cheap dates. I could go right back to the catalog and find someone better.

  One of the implications of 3498’s huge file—one that banks themselves hate to admit—is that all sperm banks have become eugenic sperm banks. When the Nobel Prize sperm bank disappeared, it left no void, because other banks have become as elitist as it ever was. Once the customer, not the doctor, started picking the donor, banks had to raise their standards, providing the most desirable men possible and imposing the most stringent health requirements.

  The consumer revolution also changed sperm banking in ways that Robert Graham would have grumbled about. Graham limited his customers to wives, but married couples have less need to resort to donor sperm these days. Vasectomies are often reversible, and a treatment called ICSI can harvest a single sperm cell from the testes and use it to fertilize an in vitro egg. Now even a man who is shooting blanks has the chance to father his own children. The treatments are expensive, but they are gradually reducing the demand for donor sperm among married couples.

  That means that lesbians and single mothers increasingly drive sperm banking. They now make up 40 percent of the customers at California Cryobank and 75 percent at some other banks. Their prevalence is altering how sperm banks treat confidentiality. Lesbians and single mothers can’t deceive their children about their origins, so they don’t. They tell their kids the truth. As a result, they’re clamoring for ever more information about the donors to pass on to their kids. Increasingly, they are even demanding that sperm banks open their records so that children can learn the name of their donor. (Lesbians and single moms have also pioneered the practice of “known donors,” in which they recruit a sperm provider from among their friends. The known donor, so nice in theory, can be a legal nightmare: known donors, unlike anonymous donors, don’t automatically shed their paternal obligations. The state still considers them legal fathers. So mothers and donors have to write elaborate contracts to try to eliminate those rights.)

  More and more married couples have also embraced the idea of openness. The old insistence on secrecy is out of fashion. Psychologists increasingly advise telling children about DI, lest the secret haunt and rend the family. (There is a small library of new books on how to tell children about their DI origins.)

  This attitude change is prelude to a legal and legislative struggle. For decades, adoptees have been fighting a brutal, and sometimes successful, war to open adoption records. DI families are about to open a second front in that war. DI kids and moms argue that children have a basic genetic right to know their father’s identity. Several countries, including Great Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, have recently ended donor anonymity and established donor registries for sperm and egg donors. When DI kids turn eighteen, they will be allowed to check the registries and learn their biological dad or mother’s name. (The British registry starts this year, which means that the first kids who can search for their donors won’t come of age until 2023.)

  The United States is a long way from having a national donor registry, but DI families are beginning to organize and lobby for one. In the meantime, American sperm bankers are carefully watching what happens with the “identity release” program at the Sperm Bank of California. Way back in 1983, that progressive sperm bank inaugurated a program in which certain donors agreed that their children could contact them when they turned eighteen. The first crop of children have just reached majority, and a handful of them have now introduced themselves to their dads. Because these reunions are proceeding without too much trauma, other, bigger sperm banks are considering their own identity release programs. (This is a classic Europe-U.S. split. In Great Britain and Sweden, the government has imposed national donor registries to end anonymity. In the U.S., private sperm banks are trying to jerry-rig their own solutions to forestall government intervention.)

  Some children, mothers, and donors are also circumventing the banks’ anonymity policies on their own. The idea of using the Internet to connect sperm bank families has taken off in the past few years. Yahoo’s Donor Sibling Registry has become a central warehouse where mothers, kids, and donors can advertise for one another. The registry, which is searchable by bank, mushroomed from a few dozen entries in 2001 to more than three thousand in 2004. These DSR listings read like singles ads, except that the object is a father or sibling, not a girlfriend.

  Hi my name is K—. I have blond hair and blue eyes. I’m looking for my father. He has blonde hair, green eyes and he is 5′9".

  There have been more than six hundred matches on the DSR so far. Most of these involve very young half siblings who are being connected by their parents. There are very few cases of children and donors finding each other, in part because so few donors have posted on the site. (Donor White is one of those who has posted.) For most American sperm donors, donating was something they did when they were quite young in order to make money. Most didn’t spend a lot of time pondering the consequences of their action, because they didn’t think there would be any. They counted on anonymity to shield them forever.

  As anonymity crumbles in Europe and on the Internet, the sperm bank industry, now all too responsive to consumer sentiment, is being caught in a squeeze: it wants to deliver the openness its customers want, but it fears that the quality and quantity of donors will plummet if banks accept only men who are willing to be identified. In the Netherlands, for example, the supply of donors has dried up since donor anonymity was abolished. The American industry must choose between conflicting notions of consumer choice: the desire for a known donor versus the desire for the best donor. Customers, of course, expect both: incredible donors who are willing to be identified.

  The consumer revolution in sperm banking has one more dark side that banks and families don’t like to discuss. Once you start thinking of sperm as just another product, you start treating it like just another product. As long as customers consider AID to be a form of shopping, some of them will inevitably be disappointed. In America, the customer is always right. A customer who is unhappy with a DVD player can replace it. What about a customer who is unhappy with a child? Shopping for sperm looks like any other kind of commerce. There are products, marketing, competition. It’s tempting to think that with enough knowledge, you will get exactly the child you want, as you can buy exactly the car you want. But sperm banks do make mistakes. They sometimes send out the wrong sperm. Sometimes they miss something dire in a donor’s medical history.

  More important, there is serendipity in DNA. A great donor can pass on a lousy set of genes. A recessive illness may be hiding somewhere, or just mediocrity. Women shop carefully for sperm in hopes of certainty. But there i
s no certainty in a baby. It does not come with a ten-year warranty. In sperm shopping, there is a deposit, but there are no returns, no refunds, no exchanges.

  CHAPTER 10

  WHO IS THE REAL DONOR CORAL?

  Donor Coral’s entry in the 1985 Repository for Germinal Choice catalog.

  A few weeks after Samantha Grant mailed her letter to the plastic surgeon Jeremy Taft, suggesting that he was Donor Coral, Dr. Taft sent her a reply. It was not what Samantha had expected. Taft denied that he was Alton’s father, denied that he was Donor Coral, and denied, in fact, that he had ever donated sperm. Samantha was baffled and irritated. She wondered if he was lying. After all, she had first approached him more than a year earlier: If he wasn’t Donor Coral, why had it taken him so long to deny it? And she noticed that he didn’t sign the rejection letter? Why was that? (I suggested that he could be afraid that she had a sample of Donor Coral’s handwriting to compare it to.) She reviewed all her evidence and was again struck by the coincidences. The similarities were so numerous: after matching age, personality, marital status, number and ages of children, hair and eye color, profession, geographic history, and hobbies, Samantha said, “you get down to a sample of one.”

  Half kidding, she mused about hiring a private detective to investigate Jeremy Taft and thought about how to obtain one of his fingernail clippings so she could DNA-test it. But then she allowed her disappointment to settle and disperse. She slowly let go of Jeremy Taft—not because she doubted he was Coral but because there was nothing to do about it. “I shall not bother him again,” she told me—her formality made it sound definitive. If Jeremy Taft wasn’t Coral, bothering him was pointless. And even if he was Coral, it was still pointless, because he clearly didn’t want to meet his son.