The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  I asked how he had managed to qualify for the Nobel sperm bank, since he had only been a young medical student at the time. “I was interested in Mensa. I had just broken up with my first wife, so I thought maybe I should follow up to try and get an intelligent wife or girlfriend. So I was reading about Mensa, and I must have seen something about the Nobel sperm bank. I was curious and I called them.”

  When the people there had interviewed him, he said, he had mentioned various distinguished ancestors and told them his IQ was 160. Had they asked for the IQ test results? No, he said.

  “Is your IQ 160?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I never took an IQ test. I told them the number I thought they would want to hear.”

  I knew the Repository had struggled for donors, but this was incredible. It had accepted a “genius” donor based on an invented IQ score.

  Jeremy and I struck up a friendly e-mail correspondence. Despite his profligate breeding, I liked him. Partly I liked him because he was unembarrassed. He talked straightforwardly about the sexual aspect of donating sperm. He mentioned that he had even seduced women at sperm banks, recounting this disconcerting story:

  “Once, when I arrived at a sperm bank, another sperm donor was arriving at the same time. He had a cast on one of his arms, so I said to myself, ‘This guy is going to need some help getting sperm into a cup.’ At that time, there were two attractive young women working at the sperm bank. I think they were college girls—premed students, most likely.

  “For purposes of anonymity, let’s call them ‘Nancy’ and ‘Susan.’ The four of us were standing there, so I said to the other sperm bank donor, ‘I’ll flip a coin, if it’s heads, you get Nancy, and I get Susan to help me . . . if tails, I’ll take Nancy and you get Susan.’ Well, I flipped the coin, and I got Nancy. I took her with me into the examination room, where I was expected to masturbate to put sperm into a cup. I put my arms around her, and she blushed a beet red color and ran out of the examination room.

  “I guess she was sort of innocent in matters of male sexuality. To this day, I don’t know what happened between the other donor and Susan. Maybe the cast was not a real cast for a real arm injury but simply something that he wore so that he could get a cute female sperm bank employee to help him get sperm into the cup?

  “Actually, at one of the sperm banks I did end up having a lighthearted sexual affair with one of the female employees that worked at the sperm bank. I say ‘lighthearted’ because although we were good friends, we were never madly in love with one another. It was more of a casual, sporadic, on-again/off-again sort of a relationship. Let’s just say that she was very talented with her hands and I was able to donate sperm without my masturbating at all.”

  After her initial euphoria about Jeremy Sampson waned, Samantha began to worry about him. Jeremy had told her immediately about his many children, figuring she would find out about them eventually. She wanted to think that his greed to breed was harmless, but the more she learned, the more it bothered her. Jeremy warned her that if Alton ever wanted to marry another sperm bank child, they should make sure to get DNA tests. This disturbed her: Did he have that many DI kids, too? Some of Jeremy’s relatives called Samantha to welcome her to the family, but also to tell her stories about him. They claimed he failed to support many of his kids financially. According to them, he had poor relationships with some of the children and no relationship with others. He was a reproductive opportunist, they said: he bred when he chose and left the parental responsibility to someone else. Samantha also learned that much of what she had been told about his family’s accomplishments had been exaggerated.

  Her correspondence with Jeremy soon grew sour and suspicious. Jeremy had been a gift, but already he felt like a curse. Every time Samantha learned something else unpleasant about Jeremy, he tried to brush it off, she thought. His imperturbability alarmed her. She wondered how he could be so unbothered by his chaotic life. Samantha and Alton started researching personality disorders on the Internet: Was there a condition that would cause someone to breed so indiscriminately?

  I was asking myself the same question. Jeremy was the fourth Repository donor I had met who practiced this kind of reproductive excess. I had started to think of these guys as The Inseminators. All four had volunteered for the Repository, which wasn’t surprising. If you have a compulsion to breed, of course you’d offer yourself to sperm banks. Two of the four—including Michael, the Nobelist’s son—had just gone to sperm banks but had not fathered their own kids. This seemed egomaniacal—though not irresponsible—behavior. But two of them—Jeremy and another guy—had fathered both sperm bank kids and lots of their own. Jeremy and the other guy relied on the wives and girlfriends to do the work of raising their children. They seemed to believe that their genetic contribution was gift enough for the child. It occured to me that I might have stumbled on a new disorder: Onan meets Don Quixote meets Cheaper by the Dozen. I called some psychologists who specialized in sexual pathology to ask them if they had ever heard of men behaving this way. They hadn’t and were intrigued. A couple of the psychologists characterized this compulsion to father children as an extreme form of narcissism. This kind of Darwinian self-involvement was a new phenomenon, they thought. Until recently, men were constrained in their breeding by the number of women they could seduce. No longer. Sperm banks allowed the Inseminators to reproduce without limit.

  By mid-July, Samantha had begun to fear what would happen if Jeremy met Alton. Alton wasn’t too keen on the idea, either. They decided to cancel the meeting. “My main concern is to protect my son,” Samantha told me. When she recalled how Jeremy had said “our boy,” it now infuriated her. Samantha wasn’t brokenhearted. She was too angry to be brokenhearted. A so-called genius sperm bank, a four-year search, and this guy was the prize?

  Samantha avoided Jeremy’s e-mails for a few weeks. Finally she told him, “We are not going to see you.”

  Jeremy replied quickly, trying to provoke Samantha into changing her mind:

  Dear Samantha:

  The only information you have about me is hearsay from third parties, rumors, and innuendo (and perhaps some tall-tales or lies).

  (Also, of course, you have my respectful and friendly e-mails to you, and we did speak once or twice on the phone, in a friendly and non-confrontational manner, if I remember correctly.)

  What information are you using to base your decisions on? Did I say or do something to offend you or upset you?

  When I was sixteen, my mother didn’t try to tell me who to meet with and who not to meet with. She didn’t tell me who to correspond with and who not to. . . . She never made any comments or suggestions about people that she didn’t even know firsthand.

  How long do you intend to “protect” Alton? Until he’s eighteen? Until he’s twenty-two? Until he’s thirty?

  After this e-mail, Jeremy proceeded as though nothing had happened, as though Samantha hadn’t rebuffed him. He offered Alton the gift of a car, his old Saab. Jeremy told me he would visit Boston in August as planned. When I mentioned that to Samantha, she was incensed. She told him she and Alton would be away, no matter when he came. Samantha also told him to stop sending them e-mail, because she and Alton didn’t want to hear from him anymore. Jeremy kept e-mailing anyway. Alton installed a block on his inbox. If Jeremy sent him mail, the autoblock bounced it with the reply “This message has been automatically deleted.” Samantha put the block on her inbox, too. Samantha, whose e-mails had been all exclamation points and glee two weeks before, now signed her messages to me “Grrr.”

  Samantha told Julianna the reunion was off and that she and Alton didn’t want to meet Jeremy. Julianna defended Jeremy. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t been a great dad, she said. “When I first heard about all his kids, I said, ‘Oh darn. Why would he have all those kids?’ But then I thought of Dr. Graham and how he used to always talk about brain drain. And I heard Dr. Graham talking in my head. ‘Isn’t this what we set out to do?’ We wanted hig
h-IQ children. We wanted babies born. Whatever it takes. ‘The smarter you are, the more children you should have,’ that’s what Dr. Graham used to say.” The kids were lucky to have Jeremy’s genes, Julianna insisted. “If women are going to have these children anyway, isn’t it better they do it with Jeremy? Isn’t it better for them to have a high-IQ father?”

  I worried that Samantha blamed me for the Jeremy debacle, so I flew to Boston to see her. She and I had still never met in person. I also wanted to clear up one thing that was nagging at me: Jeremy’s accusation that Samantha was controlling her son and ordering him to avoid Jeremy. I wondered if Jeremy had hit on something. I wanted to see for myself.

  Samantha collected me at the airport and drove me back to her house in Cambridge. She reminded me of a Sissy Spacek character: the sun-kissed farmer with an iron will who picks corn from sunup till past sundown, holds off a flood, and still looks good. She had beautiful skin. Her straight red-brown hair looked slightly archaic, as though she had gotten it styled in the nineteenth century. Her speech came in fits and starts. When she talked, it was a torrent. When she didn’t, she could sit happily in silence for minutes at a time.

  At the house, Samantha introduced me to Alton, who was wearing khaki cargo pants and a black T-shirt. He was lanky and cute, with thick hair, deep-set blue eyes, and a big cleft chin. By the time he hit college, he would be a catch. He greeted me politely but carefully. He shared his mother’s watchfulness. Though he looked a bit like his half-brother Tom, they were opposites in manner. Tom’s emotions and self-doubt were always visible. Alton was self-contained and exuded a quiet confidence.

  We started talking about Jeremy. Samantha was both laughing and bitter. “I remember Julianna showed me his application, and I remember being really impressed with all his answers. None of it was true, of course.” Almost nothing she had been told about Donor Coral actually applied to Jeremy Sampson. She pulled out his donor sheet and reviewed it.

  “They said he was a ‘professional man of very high standing.’ False; he had just graduated from medical school—and not even a good one. They said he ‘has had a book published.’ Hah! The book was self-published. They said his IQ was 160. We know about that now. Julianna told me he excelled in math. Not true. She told me his sister had won international music competitions. Not true.

  “And yet,” she said, staring at her son, “it was the best decision I ever made.” She grinned. “Despite Jeremy.”

  Alton didn’t really want to talk about Jeremy or the Repository—he’d rather have discussed calculus—but he did it. He analyzed the Repository and his origins unemotionally, as though standing next to himself.

  “They say the Repository was wrong because it practiced ‘selective breeding,’ ” he said. “I don’t understand that. That is all we do, selective breeding. When you pick a wife or a husband, that is what you do, you get to know them and make sure you like them. That is selective breeding.”

  I asked him whether he wanted to meet Jeremy. I watched for any hesitation on his part, any sign that Jeremy was right and Samantha had made the decision for him. “I have no need to see the donor,” he stated flatly. (Alton never uttered Jeremy’s name while I was there; “the donor” or “the genetic donor”—that’s what he always called him.) “I don’t have some void in my life that needs to be filled. I have Daniel and my brothers.” Daniel was his father, Samantha’s ex. His “brothers” were Daniel’s much older sons from an earlier marriage, who were not genetically related to Alton at all. “In a way we are closer because we are not related. They really are my brothers.”

  Are you sure you don’t want to see Jeremy? I pestered. “I’m not interested. Maybe when I am much older I would meet him, just for curiosity’s sake, but I would not be jumping for joy to do it. For now, I have no emotional need to do it. I just don’t have an emotional gap that needs filling.”

  I was certain: this was Alton talking, not Samantha. He was his own self, the strong-minded son of a strong-minded mom.

  It was clear that Alton was not like Tom or any of the other Nobel sperm bank kids I had talked to. I don’t know exactly what genius is, but Alton was the smartest of the Repository by far. The house was crammed with evidence of Alton’s accomplishments: stunning photographs he had taken, his piano, physics textbooks he had conquered, the schedule for his college classes, the iMac he made wiggle and shimmy. He shared his mom’s analytical intensity and gift for explanation. Robert Graham and William Shockley would have recognized Alton as a kindred spirit: he broke every question—the Iraq war, the best route for a walk, a math problem, even his own conception and birth—into its component parts, then cracked it.

  Graham would have congratulated himself on Alton’s spark and declared it a tribute to Jeremy’s glorious sperm. That would have been absolutely wrong. The most striking fact about Alton was just how much he resembled his mom. Their minds leapt and skipped in the same way. They emanated the same force field of reserved stillness. As far as I could tell, Alton had nothing in common with Jeremy but eyebrows, hair, and cleft chin.

  The similarity of Samantha and Alton made me reconsider other Repository families I had met. In every case, the kids bore a remarkable resemblance to their moms. Tom Legare resembled his mother, Mary, in his striving, his juggling of work and family, and his emotional directness. In other families, too, the maternal resemblance was striking: the overachieving kids of overachieving Lorraine; an elegant, wispy, dancing daughter of elegant, wispy, professional ballerina . . .

  The more I thought about it, the less surprising the maternal resemblance seemed. Most of these children had been raised only by their mothers. Their “social fathers” tended to be emotionally distant, and their biological donor fathers were out of the picture. So of course they were tied tightly to their moms. The mothers were women anxious for children, so motivated that they had chosen a genius sperm bank. Not surprisingly, they had become driven mothers. They spent more time with their kids than most parents did, certainly more than I did with mine or than my wonderful parents had with me. Was it any wonder their children grew up to be like them? I got the feeling that Samantha could have taken sperm from the dumbest player on the NFL’s worst team and would still have raised a brilliant boy. Her good genes would have helped, but so would the stimulating world she created around her. Any child would have fallen under that spell.

  And maybe there was also a genetic reason Alton was smart like his mom. Study after study has demonstrated the link between genes and what’s called “general intelligence”—the ability to solve problems and think rationally. In aggregate, the more intelligent the parents, the more intelligent the child. It was this connection between genes and intelligence that made Graham sure that a genius sperm bank would improve humanity. But one emerging idea in genetics calls into question the value of genius sperm. It’s called “imprinting.” This is not the “imprinting” described by animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz, which involves how animals bond to their parents. The imprinting I’m talking about concerns how genes are activated.

  Here’s the theory. A child carries two sets of every gene, one from each parent. Usually both genes are active, but some “imprinted” genes seem to be different. Only one of these genes is working: a signal tells the cell that only the maternal or paternal gene should be turned on. Cambridge University’s Barry Keverne and Azim Surani have found that maternally imprinted genes (in mice, at least) are concentrated in the “executive” part of the brain—the areas that control high-level analytical thought and intelligence. Paternally imprinted genes, meanwhile, tend to be involved with the limbic system, which is the seat of emotions and primitive, instinctual behavior. In a discovery that will not surprise any big sister, Keverne and Surani found that mice created with only maternal genes had huge brains and scrawny bodies, while mice created with only paternal genes had scrawny brains and huge bodies.* 5

  Imprinting is still a primitive theory, and no one would claim that Dad’s DNA doesn’t matt
er to his kid’s intelligence. But imprinting does cast a shadow over Graham’s grand plan. If the genius sperm is mostly contributing base emotions and big biceps rather than Quiz Bowl answers, who needs it? And imprinting makes Graham’s indifference to the intelligence of his maternal applicants seem shortsighted. Maybe the mothers were the ones who mattered after all. Imprinting, in fact, calls into question the eugenic trend of the sperm bank business. Why recruit Phi Beta Kappans when jolly frat boys would do just as well?

  On the other hand, imprinting may help explain the explosion of the egg donor industry—fertility’s latest craze. Selling eggs has become a huge and seedy business as parents hunt for healthy, intelligent young women who’ll surrender some eggs. Middle-aged couples—acting more like Darwinian auctioneers than aspiring parents—are trolling Ivy League campuses with ever-thicker wads of cash, placing ever more demanding advertisements in The Harvard Crimson and The Stanford Daily. An intelligent young coed can now collect ten, twenty, even fifty grand if she has healthy eggs to sell. Now add imprinting to the egg mania. If parents assume that maternal genes contribute extra to their children’s intelligence, the egg bubble may get even worse.

  After I read about imprinting, I sent Samantha some newspaper articles about it. She was delighted. It was a great relief to her. It meant that Jeremy was secondary—that his genes mattered less to Alton’s intellectual development than hers. She forwarded the articles to him without a word of comment.

  A few months later, she heard from him again. Jeremy, on a visit to Boston to see his sister, showed up unannounced at Samantha and Alton’s house. He wanted to meet Alton. Samantha asked Alton if he wanted to come down to see Jeremy. Alton said no. Samantha asked Jeremy to go away, and he left without even seeing his biological son. By the end of 2003, Samantha and Alton had washed Jeremy out of their lives. Samantha and I talked less, and when we did, it was more often about her job, my job, or the war. The adventure had become a misadventure.