The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  Despite Kimble’s cash, Graham still got to supervise the Repository, and he had every intention of doing that for years. In June 1996, he celebrated his ninetieth birthday. In February 1997, Graham traveled by himself to Seattle for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “He was on a recruiting trip, of course,” said Anita. “He would go to meetings like that to walk the halls,” scouting for good-looking young hotshots. On February 13, Graham fell in the hotel bathtub, hit his head, and drowned. His New York Times obituary gave equal billing to his invention of shatterproof eyeglasses and his Nobel sperm bank. Time magazine marked his death with an item in its “Milestones” section. (A couple of items below, “Milestones” also noted that week’s conviction of biologist Carleton Gajdusek for child molestation. Gajdusek was a Nobel Prize winner. I wonder if Graham had ever asked Gajdusek to donate his Nobel sperm. What would he have made of Gajdusek’s crime? Would he still have coveted Gajdusek’s Nobel seed?)

  About three hundred people attended Graham’s funeral at Emmanuel Faith Community Church in Escondido. Soon after, Anita mailed a letter to the donors announcing Graham’s passing. “We wanted to send you this personal note since you are a very special part of his dream. As per Dr. Graham’s wishes we will continue to operate the Repository in the same manner as in the past.”

  But of course it wasn’t the same. Graham’s will didn’t mention the bank, but Floyd Kimble, as expected, assumed responsibility for it. He provided cash when Anita needed it. But after a slow year, Anita was ready to move on. She resigned and moved to Europe with her husband. Kimble hired no permanent manager to replace her. Then, in September 1998, Kimble died suddenly at age seventy.

  Kimble’s death sealed the fate of the Repository. He apparently had made no provision for the bank in his will. With Anita’s departure, there was no one to collect and distribute sperm. And with Kimble’s death, there was no one to pay for it. In early 1999, Robert Graham’s widow, Marta, Floyd Kimble’s son, Eric, and medical director Frank Andersen decided to shut the Repository for Germinal Choice. After nineteen years and 215 children—not one of them a Nobel baby—the Nobel Prize sperm bank would go out of business.

  On April 29, 1999, Andersen announced the shutdown in a letter to donors. He told them that he was arranging for “proper clinical disposal” of the stored sperm. If donors wished to collect their samples for “personal use,” he would try to arrange it, but “you should know before considering such a course that it may be difficult or impossible to find a facility to accept and store the specimens, and that the cost of such an effort would be considerable.”

  Donor White tried to save the bank, in his own unobtrusive way. He thought if the shutdown were publicized, some rich man might step in to save it. Roger leaked Andersen’s letter to a San Diego TV station, but it refused to cover the story unless he appeared on camera. Careful of his privacy, he wouldn’t. Instead Roger e-mailed Logan Jenkins, a San Diego Union-Tribune columnist, telling him, “I have the feeling that if Dr. Graham were still alive, he would not wish to see his work ended in the manner proposed.” Jenkins did write a column. It ever so slightly regretted the bank’s demise, but Jenkins also did what journalists had always done to the bank—mocked it: “The world’s most notorious sperm bank is undergoing a radical vasectomy. The Repository for Germinal Choice, the mercilessly teased brainchild of Dr. Robert Graham, is tying its tubes after helping produce a litter of 215 genetically boosted babies.” So the Nobel Prize sperm bank died as it had lived, half science, half comedy. Practically every newspaper and TV station in the United States had covered the bank when it opened. Jenkins’s column was the only thing written about it when it closed.

  No sperm sugar daddy stepped forward to rescue the bank. The shutdown proceeded as planned. None of the donors requested his sperm back. Marta Graham asked Steve Broder, Graham’s original technician, if he wanted to buy any of the Repository’s equipment for use at California Cryobank. Broder didn’t, but he volunteered to help supervise the closing. One morning in mid-June, Broder and Marta Graham descended on the Escondido office for the final time. The Repository’s records—just a bunch of file folders—had already been entrusted to the Repository’s office manager. (I don’t know where she keeps them; she never answered my queries.) A medical waste company arrived. The liquid-nitrogen vats, the background of hundreds of pictures of Robert Graham clouded in vapor, were emptied and carted away.

  Next, spermicide. The frozen vials—once so precious that they had been double-locked and shielded by lead, that reporters had begged for a glance at them, that women had traveled around the globe to get their hands on them—were dumped unceremoniously in red biowaste bags and driven off to the incinerator. Dr. Graham’s dream began in ice and ended in fire.

  Neff wasn’t nostalgic when she recounted the end of the bank. “Sperm banking will be a blip in history,” she said. The Nobel sperm bank, she implied, would be a blip on that blip. And in some ways, she is clearly right. The Repository for Germinal Choice pioneered sperm banking but ended up in a fertility cul-de-sac. Other sperm banks took Graham’s best ideas—donor choice, donor testing, and high-achieving donors—and did them better. They offered more choice, more testing, more men. And they managed to do so without Graham’s peculiar eugenics theories, implicit racism, and distaste for single women and lesbians. The Repository died because no one needed it anymore.

  But the dream the Repository represented is more alive than ever. Since my two children were born, I have been thrust into the world of yuppie parental ambition. Child making and child rearing have become full-contact sports. Parents start enriching their children in the womb and never stop. The amount of parental involvement in children’s lives is scary. We dose them with Ritalin and antidepressants in the cradle, use Machiavellian maneuvers to enroll them in honors classes and select soccer teams. We live by a competitive creed: We must give our children any edge we can.

  For the moment, we seek advantage through drugs and classes and tutors, but we will use genes as soon as we can. The Repository’s notion—that good sperm will make good children—is too crude for our age,* 6 but more sophisticated science is coming, advancing Graham’s dream to the twenty-first century. The first hints of the new world are already here. A technique called “preimplantation genetic diagnosis” (PGD) allows a doctor to run genetic tests on eight-celled embryos created by IVF. The doctor and parents can then select the most genetically fit embryo for implantation in the womb. At the moment, PGD can screen for only a few genetic diseases (as well as for gender), so it’s used chiefly to help parents protect their kids from dread ailments such as cystic fibrosis. But eventually PGD will be able to tag genes associated with musical ability, blue eyes, or intelligence. When that happens, most parents will still reproduce the old-fashioned way. But the few who really care about beating Mother Nature—the ones who wrote to Dr. Graham in 1980 and who shop for egg donors at Harvard today—will be lining up for PGD and hoping for a prodigy. The old-time eugenics of Graham and Shockley and Galton is dead. No one cares about the national “germ plasm” anymore. But private eugenics has arrived to replace it. If we can get better genes for our own kids, many of us will do so. Just like the first Nobel sperm bank customers, we are captive to the great delusion that we can control our children, that we can make them what we want them to be, rather than what they are.

  The question I am most often asked is: Did the Nobel sperm bank work? By which questioners mean: Did it make superkids?

  I don’t have a simple answer. Of the 215 children of the Nobel sperm bank, I know of 30, aged six to twenty-two. I’ve met some of them, talked to many of them, and e-mailed with others. In some cases, I have only talked to their parents about them. My sample is not random; these are families that contacted me. They are probably exceptional in all kinds of ways. Most of them, for example, are single-mother families. Intact families tend to be less open about their DI secrets, partly to guard the relationsh
ip between father and children. I also suspect that my sample families are more satisfied with the Repository, because people are usually more willing to talk to reporters about things they are happy about. Still, let me try to sum the children up.

  A few of them—Alton Grant, for example—have brilliant minds. A few others have wonderful physical talents: there are a couple of superb dancers and at least one amazing singer. Of the rest, most are very good if not great students. Several kids perform below average in school. Almost all are in excellent health, but one boy in the group is autistic and one girl suffers from a debilitating muscle disease. In short, they are certainly above average as a group, but the range is very wide.

  Is this a tribute to Robert Graham and his great sperm? I don’t know, but I doubt it. These are fortunate children: they come from prosperous homes—middle class and up—and they have exceptionally attentive mothers. Most children would thrive in such surroundings. Measuring what the sperm donor contributed is simply impossible. Yes, the smartest of the kids had smart donors, but they also have smart mothers, and they have been raised in intellectually challenging environments. The most physically gifted had physically gifted donors, but they also have physically gifted mothers, and their parents have cultivated their talents. So the question of what the Repository gave its children is unanswerable. Though I suppose it could be answered this way: of all the parents I talked to, only one regretted using the Repository. The Nobel sperm bank may not have met the world’s expectations, but it met the expectations of those who mattered most: its customers.

  The children of the Repository for Germinal Choice have certainly not become an elite, celebrated cadre, as Graham hoped in his most ambitious moments. All the children lead very private lives—except one: the prodigious Doron Blake, the Repository’s second child and its most celebrated public legacy. Doron’s early achievements—computers at two, Hamlet at five, IQ of 180—and his mother’s publicity seeking made him the bank’s adorable mascot. In 1995, when Doron had reached the venerable age of thirteen, Graham declared, “When Doron Blake is old enough, I’m going to ask him to become a sperm donor himself at the Repository.” But within two years, Graham was dead. By the time Doron turned eighteen in 2000, the bank was gone.

  The Repository died, but the fascination with Doron lived on. Reporters kept calling him to find out how Graham’s experiment had turned out. As a prodigy and as practically the only Repository child who talked openly to the press, Doron was a precious commodity. He turned the media interest into a nice income stream. Any reporter who wanted to talk to him had to pay. Before he turned eighteen, his mom, Afton, dunned reporters and deposited the proceeds in a college fund. Now that he is an adult, Doron has taken over the business, asking $500 and more per interview. He uses the cash to clear college loans, buy books, pay for vacation travel. Doron told me in 2001 that he had performed his sperm-and-pony show for more than a hundred reporters, from Japanese TV crews to British tabloid reporters to 60 Minutes.* 7

  I had read countless articles about Doron as a tyke, all filled with his quick wit and his insufferable boasting. I had also seen how his mother had made a spectacle of him, sharing intimate facts about his life with millions of readers and viewers. I wanted to know what Doron had become as an adult and what it was like to be the Repository’s symbol. In spring 2001, I tracked him down at Reed College, where he was an eighteen-year-old finishing his freshman year. After I had left several messages on his sitar-twanging answering machine, we finally talked.

  “I was [Robert Graham’s] emblem. I was the boy with the high IQ who was not screwed up. I was his ideal result.”

  I had seen pictures of Doron: he was a goateed, gentle-looking hippie. His voice, however, was suffused with ennui and bitterness. The reason for the ennui was obvious: he had delivered this spiel many times before, and he was sick of it. (Doron, who usually stuttered, didn’t when he was talking about sperm. Maybe he was too well rehearsed.) But the bitterness came from somewhere else. He said “ideal result” with derision. When Doron was a boy and his mother, Afton, was thrusting him in front of the cameras, he was the hero of the Nobel sperm bank. Now that he was an adult and controlled his story, he was giving it a different ending.

  “It was a screwed-up idea, making genius people,” he said. “The fact that I have a huge IQ does not make me a person who is good or happy. People come expecting me to have all these achievements under my belt, and I don’t. I have not done anything that special.

  “I don’t think being intelligent is what makes a person. What makes a person is being raised in a loving family with loving parents who don’t pressure them. If I was born with an IQ of 100 and not 180, I could do just as much with my life. I don’t think you can breed for good people.”

  Both Afton Blake and Doron insist that she never pressured him into his youthful achievements. She was an indulgent mother, but she wasn’t a stage mom. Doron discovered by himself that he was a math prodigy and a wonderful musician. He shone at a Los Angeles school for the gifted, then won a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, one of the best high schools in the nation.

  But if Afton didn’t coerce Doron into achieving, she did something worse. She turned her son’s life into The Truman Show. British tabloid journalists visited his dorm. His love life was bandied about in print; also his difficulty making friends. His accomplishments were national news. Doron loved his mom enormously, but he had come to realize how his public childhood had twisted his life. Doron’s story was supposed to have been about nature, about his Nobel-sperm-bank-derived genetic gifts. But as Doron told it, he made it clear that he thought it was about nurture. “It was not the best thing for me to grow up in the spotlight. This is something I realized recently. I never enjoyed the media appearances, and I did not really understand the effects on me till now,” he said.

  “I have always been a shy spend-time-alone kind of person. Being in the public has made me very uncomfortable. It is one reason why now I feel that people are not going to like me. I always feel like people are examining me and probing me. It is much better for kids to grow up in a safe environment. It would have been much better if Mom had not had me microprobed.

  “Most of being a prodigy was negative,” he continued. “People have always been saying ‘prodigy sperm child’ all my life. But I am not that wonderful at anything. You feel a lot of pressure because you don’t want to let people down, or you don’t really feel free to be what you want to be.

  “Mom did not mean to, but she put a burden on me by making me feel like someone special,” he once said. “I’m always hearing that I’m special. I don’t want to be special.”

  Doron told me he believed he was “smart” in the sense that he processed information quickly. He did think that was genetic. He also thought it didn’t matter. In fact, he seemed to be going out of his way to avoid using that intelligence. Since he’d started college, he had abandoned math and science, the subjects he excelled at. He was intending to major in comparative religion. He was also passionate about music—fluent on piano, guitar, and sitar—but apprehensive about playing in public. The only career he could imagine for himself was teaching at his old high school, Phillips Exeter—“where brilliant kids have brilliant thoughts.” Maybe this was just the loneliness of freshman year speaking. Still, his hope of a return to Exeter seemed poignant. He wanted to go back in the place where he had been safest and happiest.

  Doron didn’t exactly resent his sperm bank birth. One of the first things he said to me, in fact, was that the reason he did interviews was that he wanted to show people that sperm bank kids were just like everyone else. Still, he was remarkably uncurious about his donor. He said the BBC had approached him a couple of years earlier and told him it had figured out the identity of Donor Red #28, his father. They asked Doron if he wanted to meet him. Doron said he told them that he would meet him but didn’t really care. How little did this matter to him? Doron claimed, and I believe him, that he had forgo
tten Red 28’s name after the BBC had told him. “I think it was John, and he was a computer scientist of some sort.

  “Genes have never been important to me. Family is the people you love. I feel a lot closer to people who are not my blood than to those who are. Those blood ties have never been enough to hold me ever. [The donor] is not part of my life. He has no place in my life whatsoever. He is no more than a stranger.”

  It is hard to imagine what Robert Graham would have made of his favorite offspring, now that he was all grown up. Graham prized science and scorned emotion. He hoped his sperm bank kids would build computers and synthesize medicines. Doron, once the math whiz, had disavowed hard science for the softest of studies, human spirituality. Graham had dismissed his own youthful musical career as a “waste”; Doron lived through his music. Graham sought athletic, macho donors. Doron despised sports and couldn’t stand manly men. Graham hoped his sperm bank kids would lead the world. Doron’s ambition was to teach high school. Doron was everything that Graham dreamed of—hyperarticulate, smart, brutally honest—yet he rejected all that Graham preached about genetics and intelligence. The power of Doron’s brain vindicated Graham. The feeling in Doron’s heart rejected him.

  EPILOGUE

  SEPTEMBER 2004

  When Tom returned home from visiting Jeremy in Florida, he expected that he and his new dad would stay close. Tom was gratified when Jeremy immediately kept one promise he had made to Tom in Miami: Jeremy tracked down the forms that Lana needed for her green card application and FedExed them to Kansas City. Jeremy also called Lana on her birthday in November and sent Tom $100 for Christmas. But in other ways, in the ways that mattered to Tom, he and Jeremy drifted apart. They didn’t talk much, a phone call or two per month. When they did, the conversations were comfortable but shallow. Jeremy reneged his his promise to visit Kansas City in the fall. He said he would come around New Year’s, but that didn’t happen, either. Instead, Jeremy pushed the visit back a few more months. Maybe he’d come in May, he said. By late January, Jeremy had stopped calling Tom. He was still friendly when Tom called him, but Tom got the message: Jeremy’s interest was sagging.