Slate
eBook Club
February 2004
An
Experiment in Long-Form Cyberjournalism Michael Kinsley
The
"Genius Babies," and How They Grew David Plotz
"The
Entrepreneur" Speaks David Plotz
The First Responses David Plotz
The
Myths of the Nobel Sperm Bank David Plotz
An Update and a Preview David Plotz
A Mother Searches for "Donor White" David
Plotz
Still Searching for Donor White (or Coral, or Fuchsia …)
David Plotz
The Better Baby Business David Plotz
The
Nobel Sperm Bank Celebrity David Plotz
No
Nobels, One "Failure," a Few Regrets David Plotz
Do
"Superbabies" Have Super Parents? David Plotz
The Rise of the Smart Sperm Shopper David
Plotz
The
"Genius Babies" Grow Up David Plotz
Donor White Meets His Daughter David Plotz
When
Donor White Met Joy David Plotz
An Experiment in
Long-Form Cyberjournalism
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2001, at 12:00 AM PT
At Slate we operate under
the basic assumption that good journalism is good journalism, whether it comes
to you via paper or pixels. At the same time, we do try to think hard about new
ways to do journalism in this new medium. We're not motivated entirely by a
high-minded spirit of experiment. Commercial calculation plays a role. The
brutal fact is that for nonessential reading, people for some reason still
prefer curling up with paper and ink to sitting upright in front of a computer
screen. In order to pry them away from traditional magazines, magazine-style
journalism on the Web has to offer some compensating advantages. At Slate, simply being better by
universal journalistic standards is something we're arrogant enough to aspire
to, but not arrogant enough to count on. So the search goes on.
One obvious advantage is that we're free. (During our brief attempt to charge
for subscriptions a couple of years ago, we had 30,000 takers. In December,
according to Media Metrix, we had 2.1 million "unique"—i.e.
different—
Meanwhile, our search for Web-appropriate forms of journalism has had mixed
results. We do some interesting things with e-mail, in our humble opinion, in
features like "The Book Club" and "The
Breakfast Table." Neither we nor anyone else, in our even more
humble opinion, has yet done anything journalistically dazzling with
interactivity or multimedia, though we keep trying.
One form of magazine journalism seems especially resistant to the Web. That is
the long, reportorial piece like those published in The New Yorker, the
In "Seed," Slate's
David Plotz will tell the story of the Nobel Prize sperm bank founded in the
late '70s by
At least we expect that he probably will report on it. Instead of doing all his
reporting and then composing a long article, David will file dispatches, which
we will post immediately, as he goes about his research. The readers will be
able to follow the reporter as he gathers and analyzes his material, and we
have no more idea than you do about where the story will lead him or how it
will come out. When he is done, if it works, the entire article will be
published as an eBook.
In fact, we hope that readers will actually help put the story together by
supplying information (with, as Plotz explains, strict protection of privacy) and by
engaging and helping the author to refine his arguments.
Call it "transparent journalism." And one interesting, if not
alarming, aspect of the experiment is that it will be transparent to the very
people David will need to interview and gather information from. His sources
will be able to read his mind. What effect will this have?
A decade ago a New Yorker
writer named Janet Malcolm stirred a fuss with an essay arguing that journalism
is inherently dishonest because the reporting process relies on deception. Her
famous opening lines:
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is
going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of
confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining
their trust and betraying them without remorse.
I dismissed this at the time, and since, as a typical, irritating New Yorker exercise (of that era) in
moral bludgeoning through unsupported hyperbole. Sure, some reporters deceive
and betray their sources. But more typically the relationship between a reporter
and a source is, at worst, mutually exploitative in a fairly mild way. Both
have something they want to get out of the interview—in the source's case, a
bit of vanity balm if nothing else—and both benefit from it. Just like most
deals in a free economy.
Anticipating this experiment, though, has given me pause. Would even the most
scrupulous and fair-minded reporter—i.e., Slate's
David Plotz—want his sources to know his thoughts, strategies, hopes, tentative
conclusions before he even talked with them, or indeed before they even have
decided whether to cooperate? Maybe Malcolm has a point.
Or maybe she doesn't. Would the typical source want the journalist/interviewer
to be able to read his or her mind? Would either party in any transaction,
commercial or emotional or any other sort, not feel disadvantaged by having his
or her thoughts one-sidedly exposed on the Web? Clearly there are other
interesting potential experiments here. But Plotz jumps first, and I think
we'll see where he lands before committing any more troops to this mission.
The "Genius Babies," and How
They Grew
Help Slate tell the story of the Nobel Prize sperm bank.
By David Plotz
Posted Thursday, Feb. 8, 2001, at 12:00 AM PT
Twenty years ago, on an outbuilding of his Southern California estate, tycoon
Robert K. Graham began a most remarkable project: the Repository for Germinal
Choice, a sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners. Part altruism, part social
engineering, part science experiment, the repository was supposed to help
reverse the genetic decay Graham saw all around him by preserving and
multiplying the best genes of his generation. By the time Graham's repository
closed in 1999, his genius sperm had been responsible for more than 200
children.
What happened to them? This is the beginning of a journalistic experiment to
find out, an experiment that—as I explain below—needs your assistance. (Also
click here to read Slate editor Michael Kinsley's introduction to the
project.)
Robert K. Graham was a eugenicist. He was a pessimist about humanity's future.
And he was a can-do, self-made multimillionaire. Those qualities fused to
inspire the Repository for Germinal Choice. Graham, who made his fortune by
inventing shatterproof eyeglasses, feared mankind was in danger because natural
selection had stopped working on human beings. He explained his views in a
muscular 1971 book, The Future of Man.
Over millenniums, nature's brutality had strengthened the human gene pool,
allowing the strong and smart to reproduce, while killing the weak before they
could. But once man mastered his natural environment, Graham argued, he jumped
the evolutionary track. Better living conditions allowed "retrograde
humans" to reproduce. In modern America, thanks to cradle-to-grave social
welfare programs, these incompetents and imbeciles were swamping the
intelligent. This dysgenic crisis would surely bring communism and the
regression of mankind. All that could save us, Graham warned, was
"intelligent selection": Our best specimens must have more children.
Hence the Repository for Germinal Choice.
Graham intended the repository to be a prototype for genius sperm banks all
over the country, producing "creative, intelligent people who otherwise
might not be born." The children would be future intellectuals,
scientists, and leaders and, Graham predicted in a giddy moment, "may
stimulate [humanity's] ascent to a new level of being."
So, in the late 1970s, Graham persuaded several Nobel Prize winners in
science—either three or five, depending on who's talking—to give him their
sperm. Later he recruited dozens of younger scientists for his bank. Graham
advertised for mothers in a Mensa magazine. Women had to be married to
infertile men, well-educated, and financially comfortable. Soon he had a
waiting list. He mailed out a catalog that advertised men such as "Mr.
Fuschia," an Olympic gold medallist—"Tall, dark, handsome, bright, a
successful businessman and author"; and "Mr. Grey-White … ruggedly
handsome, outgoing, and positive, a university professor, expert marksman who
enjoys the classics." (The repository revolutionized the sperm bank
industry by—oddly for such an avowedly elitist institution—democratizing it: It
took donor choice away from doctors and gave it to mothers. Instead of settling
for a doctor's paltry offerings, mothers could be demanding customers,
requiring as much [or more] accomplishment from a vial of sperm as from her
flesh-and-blood husband.)
When the Los Angeles Times
publicized the repository in 1980, a furor erupted. Eugenic ideas like Graham's
had been mainstream in the United States for the first half of the 20th
century. (Graham had even borrowed the idea of a Nobel sperm bank from a scheme
proposed by respected Nobelist Hermann Muller in the '30s.) But by the time
Graham opened the repository, eugenics had been utterly tarnished by Nazism. It
was considered at best elitist, at worst racist and genocidal.
Graham was pilloried and mocked, accused of trying to create a "master
race." Critics dubbed it the "Superbaby" program and compared it
to Nazi eugenics practices. Ethicists denounced it as a cold, utilitarian
approach toward children and an alarming step toward "designer
babies." Only one of Graham's Nobel donors, transistor inventor William
Shockley, would admit to having contributed sperm. That did not help matters.
Shockley's views on race, genes, and intelligence had made him a national
pariah, and his association with the repository confirmed suspicion that it was
a dastardly racist plot. Demonstrators picketed Graham's Escondido estate. He
hired security guards to protect the sperm.
The media's attention soon wandered, Graham stopped talking to the press, and
the repository sank from sight. But the babies started arriving. The first
birth was heralded in the National Enquirer
in early 1982. Soon "genius babies" were being born at a rapid clip.
By the time Graham died at age 90 in 1997, the repository claimed 229
offspring, all over the United States and in half a dozen countries. None of
the children, despite the bank's reputation, were fathered by Nobel Prize
winners: Early on Graham decided Nobelists were too old to be effective donors
and relied on his younger scientists.
In the beginning Graham intended the repository to be an experiment and
showpiece. He tacked pictures of the children to his office walls. He had
parents agree to answer periodic surveys about their children. But he came to
learn that his clients did not necessarily share his fascination with eugenic
theories. When he mailed a survey in the early '90s, most of the parents
ignored it.
So when the repository finally shut in 1999, it left behind a mystery. Except
for two families that have discussed their (wonderful) kids publicly, the
repository is a blank. No one seems to know what has happened to its children,
its parents, its donors.
Why shouldn't we leave it alone? Why should we want to know any more about it?
Partly because it's a fascinating riddle—did it live up to its grand
promise?—but also because the repository is not
simply a peculiar historical footnote. We are entering a new age of eugenics.
Cloning is months away, not decades. It is a guide to the future. Scientists
will soon be manipulating embryonic genes, knocking out diseases, adding
immunity, good looks, who knows what. Building better babies will soon become a
science. Eugenics will be chic again (though surely not by that name). As
reproductive law scholar Lori Andrews puts it, "private eugenics" has
replaced public eugenics. Almost no one subscribes to Graham's civic interest
in improving the American "germplasm." But it has been replaced by a
very widespread consumer interest: How can I improve my own child?
As this new-genics arrives, it poses ethical questions that give hives to
parents, doctors, and lawyers. And the new-genics raises questions about our
expectations for our children that will keep child psychologists busy for
decades.
The repository and its children matter because they preview this world to come.
Graham promised parents smarter, better children than they could have
naturally. He used the best science of his time (sperm storage and artificial
insemination) to preserve and replicate what he saw as the most valuable genes
in the world. New-genics will try to do much the same thing—though more
precisely, more microscopically, more scientifically.
The repository families—mothers, fathers, children, and even donors—offer the
only human testimony about whether the promise that technology makes better
children can be fulfilled. The repository families can tell us how the
scientific theory translates into lived human experience. The children can
teach about the burdens and joys of genetic expectations. What kinds of demands
do their parents place on them? Do they feel extra pressure to achieve because
of their genes? Do they want to know about their genetic fathers?
Mothers and fathers can explain how such children alter parental expectations.
Do they hold their kids to higher standards than they would have otherwise? Do
they tell their children about their parentage? Why or why not? How does the
genetic link to an anonymous donor change the relationship between parents and
children?
The repository's parents, children, and donors have lessons for the parents and
scientists who are grappling with the same questions now that they have
grappled with over the last 20 years. It would be wonderful to hear from them—without interfering with their
understandable desire for privacy.
Over the next months, Slate
asks you to help us try to tell the story of the Repository for Germinal Choice
and to find out what happened to its parents, children, and donors. This will
be a journalistic experiment in two ways. First, it will unfold before you. As Slate editor Michael Kinsley explains
in this "Slate Fare" column, I will write the story as I
report it. It will be transparent journalism. As I learn more—or fail to—you
will find out here. (In addition to learning about the participants, I will write
about how the repository worked, why the sperm donors' offspring rights'
movement is growing, what has happened to American eugenics, and how the
repository changed the sperm-bank industry.)
The second part of the experiment is even more important. We hope to harness
the collaborative power of the Web to make it succeed. I want you to be my
sources and guides on this story. So we invite anyone connected with the repository—parents, children,
donors, and employees, their friends and families, anyone else—to contact Slate by e-mailing me at plotz@slate.com,
calling me at (202) 862-4889, or mailing me at Slate, 1150 17th St.
NW, 10th Floor, Washington, D.C., 20036.
A Critical Note About PRIVACY
The Repository for Germinal Choice, like
almost all sperm banks, relied on a veil of privacy. Donors remained anonymous.
So did clients. Only Graham and his employees knew who they were. Slate does NOT want to pierce that veil. We respect that privacy. We do NOT want
to publish names or identifying characteristics or family secrets. We are only
interested in hearing the stories of the repository, in learning about your
experience and how it changed you. You have an important story—one that could
educate and help others in a similar situation. No one needs to know your name
for you to tell that story here.
We hope to publish your own accounts of your experiences, interviews with you,
any other method that can convey your story. We will also maintain what we hope
will be a vigorous discussion forum about the repository and the ethics of
fertility science in "The Fray."
Please contact me at plotz@slate.com with any questions or comments.
And please feel free to e-mail this article to a friend, listserv, bbs, or Web
site that might be interested.
"The Entrepreneur" Speaks
A donor tells why he gave
the Repository for Germinal Choice his Grade A sperm.
By David Plotz
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2001, at 12:00 AM PT
A day after the first installment of "Seed"
appeared, a repository sperm donor e-mailed me and said he would like to tell
his story. He's worried that Americans are too alarmist about new reproductive
technology and thinks that telling the whole story of the repository might help
calm them.
The donor and I spoke for more than an hour on Friday, and he told me why he
donated sperm to the repository, how he feels about it now, and whether he ever
thinks about the babies his sperm created.
Who is the donor? Repository founder Robert Graham generally confined himself
to scientists: Our man was one of the first businessmen Graham signed up. In
the repository's catalog, he was described as an "entrepreneur," so
that's how he asks me to identify him. The Entrepreneur, who's now in his late
40s, says he's no genius—his IQ is 149—but he otherwise lives up to Graham's
hype about his donors. The Entrepreneur is an extremely successful businessman,
someone who has launched several companies, including one that's almost a
household name. He's rich, accomplished, athletic, and driven. He also has no
children of his own.
(How do I know The Entrepreneur is not a faker? Click here for an answer.)
Slate: How did you get involved with the Repository for
Germinal Choice?
The Entrepreneur: I was
doing some speaking at a Rotary Club in 1985, and this guy—Bob Graham—comes up
after and says I would like to meet with you. I did not know who he was, but I
had heard about the repository. He took me to lunch and corralled me about it.
So were you interested?
Not really. I told him, "Hey it sounds great but we are not in trouble,
and you're not going to line up enough people to make a difference. This is
proverbially pissing in the ocean. And besides I don't think the gene pool is
really in danger. We're not lacking leaders or scientists. And there is no
assurance that if you put me together with someone else, that the child will
turn out above average."
But Graham was a passionate guy. He was very persistent. He worked on me for
probably three months. He played on the fact that I had never had any kids. He
would say, "You haven't had any kids. It looks like you aren't going to
have any." And I would say, "I don't care that I'm not going to have
any." And he would say, "I do." I felt like the dog at the dog
breeders meeting.
Why did he want you as a donor?
Bob liked me because I was a lot similar to him. I was always starting
companies and doing things. He liked that I was a hardscrabble entrepreneur.
He was fixated on people who were athletic and smart. He wanted both. That's
what the mothers were into. I tested pretty high IQ wise—149—but I was not a
genius. But he liked the drive part of it. By then he wanted to get out of the
mode of the little bald professor, the Nobel Prize winner. "Those Nobel
laureates are not going to win a basketball game anywhere," he said.
He also wanted musical ability. He kept badgering me if I had musical ability.
Mothers really liked that. I told him that I played a mean stereo.
How did he finally persuade you?
It was flattering. He was so interested. He was so devoted to it. And my
girlfriend was working it really, really hard. She wanted to get married and
have kids, and she was trying to steer me into the mode of having kids.
I just felt if it was so important to him and not important to me, I could give
it a trial for a little while. I knew it was not going to turn the world
around, but if you make a couple of mothers happy, what's wrong with that? A
little flattery, a little guilt, a little girlfriend pushing on it. Even though
I knew it was not going to make much of a difference, I was happy that Graham
was happy.
And did you believe in Graham's general
principle, that your good genes could help create better children?
Yes. I absolutely believe that genes matter a great deal. You start out and you
stay the same. You can modify maybe 7 percent to 9 percent.
Once you agreed to donate to the
repository, how long did it take till you gave?
There were a lot of hoops to jump. I had to go through background and IQ tests.
He interviewed my parents and their parents.
So how often did you give?
I would do it maybe five times a year, and one donation would have perhaps 20
vials. He would complain vigorously about that. He would say, "Look, you
are a little bit more popular than the others. Help us out." He was trying
to meet the mothers' demand. I went on giving almost up to the time of his
death in 1997.
Did he ever introduce you to any of the
other donors? Or mothers?
I got to see him quite a bit socially at his house, and he was always cagey
about it. He would intimate that other donors would be in attendance. But he
was always very careful about it. He would describe the physicists and the
symphony conductor. It was a game he would play.
But he was precise that the mothers never had any contact with the donors in
any way, shape, or form. I never saw anybody. And he made it very clear to them
that they waived in perpetuity the right to come back and sue for the names of
his donors.
From what you've been saying, it sounds
like Graham was obsessed with the repository.
He was extremely warm, almost emotional about it. He was absolutely focused on
it. He was always trying to get me to recruit other people. He was a
missionary. He had that kind of unbridled enthusiasm. He endured all criticism,
the armed guards at his estate. It did not deter him at all. But I never could
really understand why he was so fixated on this idea of breeding—especially
because he had such an average mix of kids himself.
Did he see the repository as a science
experiment?
Absolutely, and he wanted to find out what happened. He was very disappointed
that a lot of people had kids and would not contact him. Parents were
disassociating from it. That bothered him. He was very scientific person and he
wanted to have the feedback. But he did have one heckuva collection of photos.
And he absolutely thought it was a success. He would point to the whole wall of
baby photos. He was adamant that he had proved the point, would rattle off all
matter of statistics on the children in their initial testing. He was very into
that.
Did you ever find out how many kids your
sperm had produced?
They told me I was very popular. In 1987, I think, they said there were three
or four already. But I never asked after that.
Why not?
The repository was perfect for me because I was not responsible for the kids. I
really did not care. That is why I did not want to know how many kids I had.
I have not had children. I have never been interested in children. I
acknowledged it and decided not to have the child suffer my disinterest. I left
home very, very young. I left home after high school and never went back.
So you never think of your repository kids?
No, I guess I don't think of them. They are so anonymous to me—I guess because
I have never been really interested in children anyway. I never followed up
that much.
But you believe in genes, so don't you want
to know if the sperm bank kids ended up like you?
Not really. Because Graham would give no indication of who the mother
was—absolutely nothing, not even in a general sense. So you never knew half the
quotient, so it's hard to think what the kids would be like. It would have been
more interesting to me if he had gotten a little bit more profile on the
mother.
Are you afraid that one of the kids might
manage to find you?
I would expect that they destroyed any documentation on that. But I might be
thrilled. It would be nice to have it all turn out well. I would probably get
immediately emotionally involved. It might be a bit of a kick.
Sidebar
Many readers suspect that Slate
will be hoaxed by fake donors, kids, and parents claiming affiliation with the
repository. These skeptics ask how I can ever know whether anyone is legit, especially
since my sources are sheltered behind a promise of confidentiality. It's an
excellent question. The skeptics are right that it is impossible for me to know
for an absolute certainty if someone such as The Entrepreneur was in fact a
donor. After all, the repository's records are inaccessible, if they still
exist at all.
But in the case of The Entrepreneur, I am as sure as I possibly can be that he
is the real deal. He supplied, unprompted, many, many corroborating details
about the repository, its employees, and how it did business—details that no
one but someone extremely familiar with it could have known. He also holds a
prominent position in society and business and would seem to have no incentive
to invent an affiliation with the sperm bank. And the details he gave me about
his personal and professional history check out.
The First Responses
Two donors, four moms, a
possible hoax, many promising stories.
By David Plotz
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2001, at 12:00 AM PT
Lots of readers want to know what kind of response Slate has gotten to the
"Seed" experiment so far. In case you missed it, here is the piece
introducing the project, an effort to find the parents, children, and donors
involved with the Repository for Germinal Choice, the "Nobel Prize"
sperm bank started by Robert Graham in the late '70s.
The short answer: The Internet works, and so does anonymity. Thanks to the
Net's incredible speed and enormous reach, we have heard from lots of people
already. Thanks to the veil of privacy, we're hearing from people who otherwise
never would have discussed
this.
Last night, we posted an interview with a
repository donor, "The Entrepreneur," who describes how Graham and
his own girlfriend guilted him into donating sperm and tells why he doesn't
ever think about his repository kids. Today we publish very interesting letters from two anonymous mothers who
recount why they had children through the repository and how those kids have
turned out. We also are publishing a "Fray" posting from someone claiming
to be a 17-year-old repository child. We're dubious.
Slate will get to
several other stories soon. A mother called me Monday afternoon to tell me
about her daughter: The mother wants Slate
to help her find the donor. We will, next week. The relative of another mother
is corresponding with me (with the mother's permission) about that mother's
effort to find her child's donor. And I hope to meet with two other mothers
later this week on a trip to Southern California.
I have also heard from another donor—more on that soon, I hope—a former
employee of the repository, a friend of one of the repository kids, several
women who tried and failed to get pregnant using the repository's supersperm,
and the granddaughter of Dora Vaux, the repository's office manager, who died
last year. (She writes, "My mom and I always got a giggle out of just the
idea of my little Grammie working at a sperm bank and not only being there
while the men were there to actually donate but actually soliciting very
important men, high in their fields, to do such a thing. But the fact was, she
had an incredible job and was really good at it judging by the number of donors
she was able to recruit.")
But obviously we don't have anything like a cross-section of repository
families and donors yet. That's why we hope to hear much more from you.
sidebar
Two Anonymous Moms
Their kids are
great, but don't call them "superbabies."
In the past few days, Slate
has received two anonymous messages from women who say they had children from
the repository. One came by e-mail to me. The other was posted in "The
Fray."
First of all—because I know readers are worried about charlatans—both mothers
sound legit. Mother 1 includes several corroborating details—most notably the
fact that Robert Graham's office manager was named Dora. The second mother
includes fewer details, but the letter has an air of credibility to it.
What struck me about both mails, and what has struck me about all my contacts
with mothers so far, is the rather healthy, almost skeptical attitude that the
mothers have about the repository's goals. Neither of these mothers was
interested in bearing "superbabies." They just wanted to give themselves
a better chance of having a healthy, intelligent child. They are proud of their
children's achievements, but they certainly don't seem obsessed with their
genes. Neither mother is a fanatic on the nature-nurture question: They credit
their own parental involvement with their kids' success.
I would like to hear more from both mothers. Do they think they place too many
demands on their children? Mother 1 says she doesn't think about her kids being
"special." Is that true? How about the kids—do they feel that their
parents' expectations are too high? Does the son of Mother 2 feel extra
pressure now that he knows his biological origins? Mother 1 says she and her
husband haven't told her kids about their origins: Why not? What issues concern
them? Do most parents tell their kids or not? Should they?
If either anonymous mother—or any other parent, child, or donor connected to
the repository—wants to help answer those questions, Slate would love to hear from you.
You can share your story anonymously by e-mailing me at plotz@slate.com
or calling me at (202) 862-4889.
Anonymous Mother 1
I am not sure I should be sending you this email. My husband doesn't want me to
email you because he thinks that this will end up being a "hit piece"
and we will be treated badly. I think that I need to speak up in defense of the
Repository, my decision, and my family. Please do not try to track us down for
your own curiosity or for this Slate story.
I am the mother of two children (a boy born in 1988 and a girl born in 1991)
from the Repository for Germinal Choice donor Red #46. My husband and I
celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary this year and we will toast both the
Repository & Red #46 at the renewal of our vows.
When I first started talking with the Repository and Dr. Graham's assistant,
Dora, I was very skeptical about their motives and goals. At that time,
1985-1986 there was a woman who had gone "public" and she was a total
California flake. She was unmarried and had wanted to produce a perfect child
(she had a boy) that she was going to give, as a gift, to mankind. I have
always wondered what happened to that child—he had an unusual Greek name. I
know that as a result of this incident, the Repository started "recruiting"
married, more stable parents.
I guess we fit the Repository's idea of candidates—my husband and I have Mensa
level IQ (good test takers), are highly educated, professionals, have a strong
family support system, I am robustly healthy (my husband is not—the reason we
didn't conceive naturally), and we are financially secure. We talked and talked
with the Repository—a two-year philosophical exploration—we already knew that
we wanted two children (we think a family is more than one child) from the same
donor who had to have all the qualities of my husband. As a practicing Roman
Catholic (yes, I still am) I was terribly torn between my desire/need to create
a family and the religious/ethical dilemma that this presented. I prayed for
guidance. We, of course, considered adoption and actually started down that
path but found ourselves emotionally and intellectually involved in Dr.
Graham's quest. I have to tell you that the Repository never charged us a cent
and were the most patient, caring, understanding people. Not what you would
expect from an "at best elitist, at worst racist and genocidal"
group. All they asked was a good home/family for these loved and wanted
children to grow up in so they could become the best human beings that they
could be. Yes, our children and I think the other Repository children have had
every possible opportunity in life beginning with the gifts of being wanted and
loved. Our children are as much a gift from God as any other children—not the
"cold, utilitarian approach toward children" you described in your
article.
The option to establish a connection with the donor and to have him be willing
to work with us for multiple pregnancies was what closed the deal. Our donor,
who we were able to correspond with, physically resembled my husband, had the
same Eastern European ethnic origin, had similar intellectual and creative
pursuits, the same level of education as well as the same profession. The big
difference was that Red #46 was healthy and had already fathered healthy
children both in his own family and for the Repository.
The conceptions and pregnancies were normal considering my age, first pregnancy
at 35; both were delivered by caesarean section. My physician was aware that
the pregnancies were the result of artificial insemination and the origin of
the donor. Both babies were completely normal with our son having a remarkable
resemblance to me from birth. He could have been cloned! When we are in groups,
such as at school events, people have no difficulty finding the parents of our
two children based on physical resemblance alone.
Both children are the picture of health, quite athletic, which is not a
surprise given that they have abundant food, medical care, a safe home, and the
opportunity to play. All children would thrive in this environment. They are
considered to be the best students in their small, parochial school and test
right off the top of the charts on academics as well as music (both play
instruments) and art. This is also not a surprise given that they receive lots of
individual attention from dedicated teachers. I can't determine where the good
genetics stop and the good environment begins—I am not sure that I need and/or
want to. Every now and then something (like your article) reminds me that they
are "special" but the rest of the time they are just regular kids to
me. When they were babies I was much more conscious of their developmental
progress and I would catch myself wondering how they were "different"
but not anymore. In fact, I hardly ever think about it and I expect that as
time goes by I will completely put it out of my mind.
One thing that my husband and I have not come to terms with is telling our
children about their biological father and the role of the Repository. We have
said nothing but we have kept the red capped vial that conceived each of them
and the correspondence from Red #46. Within the family only their maternal
grandparents know. Once we discussed when would be an appropriate age for
disclosure and we couldn't agree—I don't want to ever tell them ...
So, there you have it.
Anonymous Mother 2
This was a Fray posting from "A Nobel Baby's Parent." Click here to read it and the discussion it sparked.
She has also posted two follow-up notes, here and here.
As the mother of one of the so-called "Nobel" babies, I'd like to let
people know that my decision to accept donated sperm from Dr. Graham's
Repository was not necessarily motivated by the urge to create a
"superbaby." My husband is surgically sterile, and we were told,
prior to my son's conception, that his vasectomy was not likely to be reversed with
any success (medical science was not quite as far along in 1984). My only hope
for having children was donor sperm, or adoption.
Believe it or not, I opened the Yellow Pages to look for sperm banks, and
because I live close to the former location of the Repository, it happened to
be in the phone book.
Faced with the choice of choosing "unknown" sperm donated by some
medical or dental student that got paid for his "donation," or
choosing sperm from the Repository, who on earth wouldn't have chosen the
Repository? To make matters even simpler, the Repository did not even charge
for the sperm.
I had to go through a rigorous application process; I met with Dr. Graham, and
with his wonderful employees; I visited a gynecologist for a checkup and for
instructions on how to do the insemination at home. It was successful on the
first try.
My son is now 16 years old. I did not inform him of his genetic makeup until
about two years ago, because I did NOT want him to be taunted at school, or
suffer the consequences of other's opinions. His secret has always been
well-protected, and still is.
The boy is beyond smart. I'm quite sure he's way beyond genius. It was never my
intention to "cultivate" this particular aspect of his existence—I
was happy simply to have my own and only child, however he or she would turn
out.
Nor does it particularly matter to me now that he's in line for valedictorian,
has a vast knowledge of computers, technology, international finance,
geopolitics, and other subjects he's grown interested in entirely on his own.
I'm very proud of him, of course, but it wouldn't have mattered to me if he was
last in his class. I did not take him to Montessori. He's had a public school
education, and has been given no special treatment because of his intelligence,
other than providing him with the necessary tools to enhance his interests and
education.
Did I do anything wrong or immoral? I don't think so. If my husband and I could
have children together, certainly, we would have done so. My story may not parallel
with the other recipients of "Nobel" sperm, but as far as my opinion
on eugenics is concerned, I'm all for it, given what I know now. Why not? I'll
never know how much the donor sperm had to do with my son's development, and
frankly I don't care. What I do know is that the donor sperm I selected went
through a far more thorough testing process than any sperm I may have received
from an unknown donor.
sidebar
Letter From a Repository Kid? Maybe.
"Albert E. Cruikshank" posted the following message in "The
Fray" Sunday night. He says he's a child of the repository.
My parents told me I was a product of the sperm of a doner to the Repository
for Germinal Choice.
I'm 17 and have now known about this for 4 months.
Today I saw the Slate article and got into a fight with my Mom. She says I was
supposed to be smarter. That was why she told me. Because I won't be going to
college on account of my scholastic ineptitude.
She said she would have tried to get a refund if the place didn't close—and if
the process had actually cost her anything.
So, it doesn't mean you will be smart just because your parents are. My parents
are both very well known doctors in one of the country's largest citis. As for
me, I'm looking at going to art school and learning guitar. Or maybe re-doing
grade 12 and trying to get into an easier college. Don't know.
Fray readers are skeptical. Read their responses to Cruikshank at the bottom of
his Fray message.
I'm skeptical too. Cruikshank is correct about one detail that he could not
have learned from my story: Cruikshank's mother told him the process did not
cost anything. Unlike most sperm banks, the repository did not charge mothers.
Founder Robert Graham considered the repository his form of social work.
But when I tried to e-mail Cruikshank to check his credibility, the mail
bounced back. Cruikshank also made several other Fray postings under different
names that sounded very different from this one. Still, "Albert
Cruikshank," if you're out there and you want to confirm that your story
is true, send me an e-mail. If it is true, I would love to know more. Has it
been upsetting or liberating for you to learn about your origins? Has your
mother always been on your case about being smarter? Do you resent the
repository? Do you want to know anything about your biological father? Please
contact me at plotz@slate.com or (202) 986-1168. Anyone else
involved with the repository, please do the same.
The Myths of the Nobel Sperm Bank
The
truth about who gave sperm, how they gave it, and who used it.
By David Plotz
Posted Friday, Feb. 23, 2001, at 12:00 AM PT
Last week, on a trip to Southern California to meet Nobel sperm bank mothers, I
spent an afternoon with Paul Smith. Smith was the first director of the bank,
the Repository for Germinal Choice. He is one of the few people remaining who
knows how the repository worked and perhaps the only one who will talk about
it. (Click here for why there is so much silence.)
Smith—a sanitary engineer, dog breeder, and Vietnam draft-dodger—was repository
founder Robert Graham's most zealous employee, and he has devoted his life to
the cause of genius sperm banking (or "high-achievement sperm
banking," as he calls it). He supervised the repository during its most
notorious years, from 1980-84, and since he left, he has operated his own
genius sperm bank, Heredity Choice. Today he and his wife, Adonna Frankel, run
Heredity Choice from their home in the California desert. Click here to read more about Smith and the very
odd history of his sperm bank.
Smith, Frankel, and I spent several hours discussing how the Repository for
Germinal Choice actually worked. This is an interesting subject because
essentially every bit of public lore about the sperm bank is false. When the
repository opened in 1980, the press corps and public were enthralled (and
sometimes horrified) by the myth of the "Nobel Prize sperm bank." No
one ever learned its proper name because "Nobel Prize sperm bank" was
such a mesmerizing substitute. Founder Graham played up the bizarre glamour of
the operation, and the press loved it. Stories depicted a kind of strange James
Bondian experiment: Majestic Nobel Prize winners were covertly handing over
their precious life fluids to a mysterious millionaire inventor. He guarded
these priceless vials ferociously, entrusting the precious semen only to the
most superb women, Mensa-qualified geniuses who passed his rigorous qualifying
tests.
In fact, none of this was true.
Graham, who made his fortune by inventing "impact resistant" plastic
eyeglasses in the late '40s, had been obsessed since childhood with improving
human genetic stock. Graham believed intelligent people had an obligation to go
forth and multiply—he had eight kids himself. In the mid-'60s he started the
Foundation for the Advancement of Man to pay for the birth and care of children
born to poor married couples of "superior mental qualifications."
Eventually Graham fixated on the idea of using a Nobel Prize sperm bank to
spread the best seed widely. (The sperm bank idea had originated in the '30s
with Hermann Muller, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist. Muller, a communist, had
tried to recruit Josef Stalin as a donor.) Graham's bank would provide women
with "the choicest genes … above average is not enough," as one early
pamphlet put it. In his view, the repository couldn't stop the social welfare
system from breeding morons but could provide a few talented people who might
repair the damage caused by the imbecilic masses. In 1978, after he sold his
company Armorlite to 3M, Graham went to work. He housed the
repository—essentially some liquid nitrogen storage tanks—in the basement of a
well house on his San Diego estate. Later he moved it to a small office in Escondido.
Graham scoured California for Nobelists, approaching the more than two dozen
who lived in the state. Only three agreed to give their sperm. Graham's
assistant collected from them in 1979. But when Graham announced the Nobel
sperm bank to the press in early 1980, the outcry frightened his laureates. Two
immediately broke their association with the bank. Only William Shockley
admitted his affiliation, but even he never donated sperm again. ("It's
too bad," says Smith. "Shockley's sperm was actually pretty
good.") Graham was left with a Nobel sperm bank with no Nobel sperm.
(Graham also rationalized the Nobelists' departure by saying they were too old
to provide decent sperm anyway.)
Without Nobelists, Graham needed a new scheme for his sperm bank. At this time,
Smith arrived to assist Graham. His chief task was finding new donors.
"Instead of recruiting Nobelists, I decided to predict who the future
Nobel laureates would be," Smith says. He approached young scientists who
had won awards. He haunted the campuses of University of California at Berkeley
and Caltech, where young Übernerds
are thick on the ground. At first, Smith and Graham focused on hard scientists
and cared only about intelligence, but they soon realized their clients weren't
satisfied with just brains. "Women would always ask how good-looking he
was and how tall he was, and they would want to know if he was athletic. We
realized that if you are going to offer choice, you have to offer women a real choice," Smith says.
Smith's hit rate was dismally low. He estimates he approached about 100 men
during his four years at the bank, and only "six or eight, maybe 10"
became donors. "Some of them thought I was a Nazi or the devil. Some of
them had wives who said no. Some of them probably had had a vasectomy. Some of
them probably knew they had some condition that would disqualify them,"
Smith says. (The repository collected elaborate medical histories of donors and
excluded those with low sperm counts, bad family histories, or certain diseases.)
And the repository didn't pay its sperm donors a penny, which also surely
discouraged them.
The few who signed up, Smith says, tended to be civic-minded men who
sympathized with Graham's eugenic anxiety. "Show me a blood donor, and I
will show you a sperm donor," says Smith. "One donor told me he
thinks he is doing more for society with this than he has with any of his
inventions or patents. And he has 17 patents."
(In case you were wondering, none of these donors have gone on to win Nobel
Prizes, though Smith says that's because many of them are in mathematics and
computer science, which are not Nobel categories.)
All of the repository's donors were white. Was Graham a racist? Click here for a brief discussion.
Smith made house calls around the country to collect the sperm. One donor
recalls meeting Smith at a seedy motel and supplying his sample there. Another
time Smith had him use his office bathroom. Smith says he has never brought
pornography with him: "My donors have always had sufficient imagination
that I don't need it." When Smith appeared on television or in newspaper
photos to promote the repository, he wore a mask or hid his face. That way, he
says, secretaries and colleagues of his donors could not recognize him and know
that he was gathering seed.
Smith traveled with a small mobile collection kit. The kit Smith uses today—a
rolling flight attendant suitcase—contains a small tank of liquid nitrogen, a
microscope, a centrifuge, collection cups, and something called a "Makler
counting kit," which allows him to estimate the number of motile sperm in
the specimen. He freezes the sample on the spot in the vapors of liquid
nitrogen. Each ejaculation is divided into as many as five vials, each of which
could be used for one insemination. Some later donors had to do all this work
themselves. The repository would send them liquid nitrogen, collection cups,
and vials and have them prepare their own samples. "You had to thaw the
buffer, then ejaculate in a cup, then transfer it using a needle to vials, then
freeze them for 40 minutes, then put them in the liquid nitrogen. It was
incredibly time-consuming to do it," says one donor.
Graham and Smith advertised their wares in a highly unglamorous mimeographed
catalog. It identified each donor with a color and number, summarized
him—"Gifted research biologist at world renowned research center"—and
described his personality, manual dexterity, hobbies, athletic achievements,
and general health. It also listed standard features such as ethnic ancestry,
eye color, skin color, hair color, height, weight, and general appearance. You
can see sample pages from donors "Fuchsia No. 1," "Coral No. 36," "Turquoise No. 38," and "White No. 6."
The other great myth of the repository was that it restricted its sperm to
Mensa members. Graham did promote the repository in a profile for a Mensa
magazine, but he never made Mensa membership—or any intellectual
qualification—a condition. The repository took essentially any married woman
who applied. (Graham's wife made him exclude single women and lesbians.) Smith
says that hundreds of women applied in the first few years, and only two were
rejected: one who was taking lithium, another who was obese and diabetic.
Most mothers, Smith says, didn't apply to the repository because they expected
a superbaby. Almost all applicants had infertile husbands, so they chose the
repository as the best of bad options. Repository literature did brag
incessantly about the A-one sperm, but most clients seem to have recognized
that this was not exact science. They hoped for a slight boost, not a
mini-Nobelist.
Smith says that there was a remarkable concentration of doctors and nurses
among the women applicants. My own investigation so far seems to confirm this.
Of the six mothers I have spoken to, four are in the healing professions, and
they sought the repository for the health as much as smarts. Says one mother
who's a doctor, "I see terrible health problems all the time in
3-D—suicides, bad illnesses. I went to the repository because I did not want to
plague a child with that."
Of the repository's hundreds of applicants, only a small fraction bore
children. The process was inexpensive—Graham, who saw the bank as charity work,
did not charge for sperm—but it was onerous. Sperm vials were mailed out to
women or their doctors, who had to thaw and insert them at the right moment in
the ovulation cycle. It frequently required several cycles before a pregnancy
took, and some women never got pregnant at all. Mothers waived their right to
sue if they didn't get pregnant, the right to know the donors, and the right to
sue if a child didn't meet their expectations. Only 20 women had children by
1984, Smith estimates.
That was the year Graham dumped Smith as repository director after a defamation
suit by another sperm bank. A rival bank in Oakland sued after Smith told a
magazine reporter, "If [women] want defectives, they can go to
Oakland." Smith took all the donors with him when he left the repository
and opened Heredity Choice. (If you missed the sidebar about Paul Smith and the
odd story of Heredity Choice, click here.)
After Smith's departure, Graham became his own chief recruiter. He wrote
solicitation letters to young men listed in scientific "Who's Who" guides.
He attended scientific conferences and introduced himself to promising new
Ph.D.s. (Graham kept conference-going till his death, literally. He died at age
90 when he slipped in a bathroom at a meeting of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science.) Graham came to recognize that not all women were
excited by lab coats, so he expanded his stable to include athletes, artists,
and businessmen. According to one report, he even tried to persuade Queen
Elizabeth's husband, Prince Phillip, to donate. (Given that the prince has
never shown any evidence of any kind of brain activity, the solicitation
certainly does not speak well for Graham's notion of achievement.)
Graham's son Robin says his father was "aloof" to his own children.
Graham seems to have reserved his warmth for his sperm bank kids. He visited
many of them and wallpapered his office with their snapshots. One mother wrote
me that she has always considered Graham, not the donor or her ex-husband, the
father of her children.
The repository produced about 15-20 kids per year through the late '80s and
early '90s, but Graham's 1997 death essentially killed it. Graham had funded it
out of his own pocket, probably to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars
per year. Graham had considered providing for the repository in his will but
eventually left the decision to his heirs. His wife and children apparently
didn't share his enthusiasm, and the bank closed in early 1999.
News of the shutdown shocked some mothers. Some had hoped they would be able to
use the repository to find their donors or their kids' half-siblings. Indeed,
the repository staff had helped several moms correspond anonymously with their
donors. The repository's closure ended any hope of further contact. The
repository destroyed its thousands of semen samples. As for the repository's
records, no one will say what happened to them. State law does not require the
repository to keep its records and certainly doesn't require it to release any
information to mothers. No one connected to the repository in its final days is
willing to talk about the records, either to me or to mothers who want to find
their donors.
This vacuum is the main reason why mothers are contacting Slate. The records are gone, so they
hope the collaborative power of the Web can help them find donors and siblings.
And that is exactly what the next Seed articles will do.
sidebar
The repository has left an information vacuum because the people who know
about it have died or clammed up. Repository founder Robert Graham died in
1997. Dora Vaux, the repository office manager and the person who may have
known most about donors and clients, died last year. Graham's widow, Marta Ve
Graham, is retired and has declined several interview requests. Robert Graham's
son Robin, who managed his father's company, says neither he nor any of his
brothers and sisters ever paid much attention to the sperm bank. I can't locate
Anita Neff, the repository's last director, or Frank Andersen, the repository's
final medical officer. And Eric Kimble, who headed Graham's Foundation for the
Advancement of Man, first agreed to be interviewed but has not returned
repeated follow-up phone calls and faxes.
sidebar
Paul Smith is the great eccentric and true believer of the genius sperm
bank cause. He has been hooked on the sperm banking idea since he heard about
Hermann Muller in the early '60s.
"For 40 years I have had the feeling I am doing something that will make a
difference. It is not a matter of changing the whole profile of genetics in the
U.S. But it is providing a few more potentially great people, one genome at a
time."
Smith came to Graham after spending more than 10 years in exile in England
fleeing the Vietnam draft. When Graham jettisoned him from the repository,
Smith never even considered abandoning sperm banking. He took the repository
donors with him and started Heredity Choice, which he and his wife now run out
of their desert home in Pearblossom, Calif.—a 10-acre spread shared with the
border collies and huskies they breed and the potbellied pigs they have
rescued. (His wife, Adonna Frankel, is committed to the cause as well. She was
a client of Heredity Choice before they met: She froze embryos made from her
eggs and Heredity Choice's genius sperm. She and Smith hope to use those
embryos to have their own kids.)
Smith—who looks like a gaunter version of Ed Harris, if such a thing is
possible—has a very peculiar manner. He frequently zones out during
conversation or starts talking about an unrelated subject. When it happens, his
wife gives him a friendly tug and yanks him back to earth. Still, he's very
charming, mostly because he is the only person associated with the repository
who seems to have a sense of humor.
Smith estimates that Heredity Choice has produced "hundreds of kids, many
more than the repository did."
It is, however, the only sperm bank the state of California has ever closed.
The state tissue bank inspection unit forced Smith to shut Heredity Choice a
few years ago because he had no running water for his lab and was storing human
and dog semen together.
Smith insists that he does not need running water because he uses purified
water, and that the dog/human charge has been sensationalized. He claims he had
only one set of dog semen samples, they were kept in a separate liquid nitrogen
tank, and he stored them in a different kind of vial.
All the same, the image of dog and human sperm mingling sticks in the brain.
Smith didn't help matters when he told reporters that "none of my clients
has ever had a puppy." The reporters did not get the joke.
The shutdown didn't deter Smith. He simply transferred his sperm storage to
Nevada, which has no regulations about sperm banking.
Smith accepts that the world has not embraced his cause. He once hoped that
others would follow him into genius sperm banking, but no one has. He has only
eight donors for Heredity Choice because it is too expensive to find and test
new ones. Still, he hasn't lost his good cheer: At the end of our interview, as
I was saying goodbye, he and Adonna asked me to put them in touch with Bill
Gates. They would like him as a donor. "I don't think much of his
operating system," Smith said, "but I would like his sperm."
sidebar
All the donors for Graham's bank were white, and his only public donor
was William Shockley, whose obsession was the low intelligence of American
blacks. Graham's critics called him a racist because of this. Was he? The
evidence is ambiguous. His son Robin denies he was racist, so do donors and
mothers who knew him, so does Smith. Smith says he tried hard to recruit black
and Asian donors and that he once found a black donor who was rejected only
because he was diabetic. And the repository gave sperm to at least one Asian
client. On the other hand, Smith concedes that Graham thought blacks were less
intelligent than whites, and legal scholar Lori Andrews reports that Graham
asked her to find a legal way to prevent "an unmarried black woman"
from receiving his genius sperm.
sidebar
Paul Smith is the great eccentric and true believer of the genius sperm bank
cause. He has been hooked on the sperm banking idea since he heard about
Hermann Muller in the early '60s.
"For 40 years I have had the feeling I am doing something that will make a
difference. It is not a matter of changing the whole profile of genetics in the
U.S. But it is providing a few more potentially great people, one genome at a
time."
Smith came to Graham after spending more than 10 years in exile in England
fleeing the Vietnam draft. When Graham jettisoned him from the repository,
Smith never even considered abandoning sperm banking. He took the repository
donors with him and started Heredity Choice, which he and his wife now run out
of their desert home in Pearblossom, Calif.—a 10-acre spread shared with the border
collies and huskies they breed and the potbellied pigs they have rescued. (His
wife, Adonna Frankel, is committed to the cause as well. She was a client of
Heredity Choice before they met: She froze embryos made from her eggs and
Heredity Choice's genius sperm. She and Smith hope to use those embryos to have
their own kids.)
Smith—who looks like a gaunter version of Ed Harris, if such a thing is
possible—has a very peculiar manner. He frequently zones out during
conversation or starts talking about an unrelated subject. When it happens, his
wife gives him a friendly tug and yanks him back to earth. Still, he's very
charming, mostly because he is the only person associated with the repository
who seems to have a sense of humor.
Smith estimates that Heredity Choice has produced "hundreds of kids, many
more than the repository did."
It is, however, the only sperm bank the state of California has ever closed.
The state tissue bank inspection unit forced Smith to shut Heredity Choice a
few years ago because he had no running water for his lab and was storing human
and dog semen together.
Smith insists that he does not need running water because he uses purified
water, and that the dog/human charge has been sensationalized. He claims he had
only one set of dog semen samples, they were kept in a separate liquid nitrogen
tank, and he stored them in a different kind of vial.
All the same, the image of dog and human sperm mingling sticks in the brain.
Smith didn't help matters when he told reporters that "none of my clients
has ever had a puppy." The reporters did not get the joke.
The shutdown didn't deter Smith. He simply transferred his sperm storage to
Nevada, which has no regulations about sperm banking.
Smith accepts that the world has not embraced his cause. He once hoped that
others would follow him into genius sperm banking, but no one has. He has only
eight donors for Heredity Choice because it is too expensive to find and test
new ones. Still, he hasn't lost his good cheer: At the end of our interview, as
I was saying goodbye, he and Adonna asked me to put them in touch with Bill
Gates. They would like him as a donor. "I don't think much of his
operating system," Smith said, "but I would like his sperm."
An Update and a Preview
By David Plotz
Posted Friday, Feb. 23, 2001, at 12:00 AM PT
Slate has now
heard from about half-a-dozen parents and half-a-dozen donors from the
Repository for Germinal Choice. The reasons parents and donors have for
contacting Slate are
radically different. The donors want to discuss and evangelize the theory of
the project. They want to explain why Graham created a genius sperm bank and
speculate about how the repository connects to contemporary eugenic efforts
such as cloning. They aren't much interested in finding their offspring. (For a
sample of donor thinking, read this interview with "The
Entrepreneur.")
The mothers are largely indifferent to the theory. They are pleased that their kids
are turning out OK, but that's not what concerns them. Rather, they view Seed
as an opportunity to find their donors and related kids. Several mothers are
seeking half-siblings of their children. (There is an interesting and vigorous
discussion of this in "The Fray," where two anonymous moms are
trading bits of information. Click here to see the beginning.) Other moms are
searching for their donors so that their kids can meet their "dads."
All these mothers see Slate
as a kind of swap meet. They will be able to find each other, with Slate acting as the intermediary.
This is a wonderful aspect of Web interactivity that did not occur to us when
we started the Seed project: By offering to tell stories from the repository,
we have become the clearinghouse for mothers. We can assure their privacy while
helping them to connect. It makes a better story for us, and it helps them.
(For example, I am in touch with a mother who used donor Fuchsia. I know of
another family that also used Fuchsia. If they want to get in touch, they can
tell me, and I can introduce them.)
In the next week, I will write about some of these maternal quests,
particularly a poignant story of a mother who used to correspond anonymously
with her donor. The repository forwarded their mail, deleting any identifying
information. The donor wanted to meet his daughter. And the mother wanted her
daughter to meet the donor. But in 1997, the repository stopped forwarding
their letters, and they have lost each other. She hopes that the donor will see
her story and try to find her through Slate.
A Mother Searches for
"Donor White"
Ten years ago, she used
his sperm to have a daughter. Now she wants to find him, and he wants to find her.
But they don't know each other's names.
By David Plotz
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 27, 2001, at 12:00 AM PT
In early 1991, a woman—she wants to call herself "Beth"—took her
7-month-old daughter—whom she wants to call "Joy"—on a trip to
Southern California. Beth wanted to visit the Repository for Germinal Choice,
better known as the "Nobel Prize sperm bank." The repository had
given her the sperm that had fathered Joy, and she felt profoundly grateful to
its employees, who had always been very kind to her. She felt even more
grateful to "Donor White," the anonymous man who had supplied her
sperm.
Beth wanted Donor White to see his daughter, and she had heard he lived near
the repository. Beth knew she wouldn't be allowed to meet Donor White, so she
told Dora Vaux, the repository's office manager, that she would drop Joy off at
a certain time, then return several hours later. The day came, and Beth left
her infant at the repository. Dora Vaux called Donor White, and he rushed over
to see Joy. When Beth came back to collect Joy, Vaux told her that Donor White
had been ecstatic. He "said he would live on that moment for the rest of
his life." Donor White left a gift for Joy, a Fisher-Price doll.
Beth had found the Repository for Germinal Choice in the 1980s after reading a
newspaper article about the genius sperm bank. Her then-husband had had a
vasectomy, and they decided the repository offered the best chance for ensuring
a healthy baby. They read its catalog, and they liked the sound of Donor White
No. 6. (See his catalog page here.) He was 6 feet tall, brown-haired, and
blue-eyed. Repository staffers told Beth he looked a bit like her husband. He
was in his 50s, and he'd enjoyed a distinguished career as a "scientist
involved in sophisticated research." He read history and liked to garden.
He came from a long-lived family.
But what sold Beth on Donor White was something else repository staffers told
her: "They never told me I would have a genius baby. But they had seen
some of his other babies [from the sperm bank], and they said he had happy
babies. And I wanted a happy baby."
And that's what she got: a happy baby who has grown into a happy girl.
"She is wonderful," Beth says, "Not a prodigy. Not an egghead,
but a wonderful well-rounded person." In a letter to me, Beth wrote that
Joy "is a good student … but first and foremost, a sweet little girl,
pretty, athletic, and
smart."
As her daughter grew up, Beth yearned to stay in touch with Donor White.
"I was so grateful to him for this special girl." She frequently
mailed photos of Joy to the repository and always enclosed an extra copy to be
sent on to Donor White.
Donor White loved the pictures. In 1995, he sent Joy a fifth birthday card
through the repository, thanking Beth for all the photos. He told her he and
his wife had collected them in a photo montage. Donor White signed his name to
the card, but the repository blanked it out.
Their correspondence grew brisk. Beth sent Donor White a Father's Day card. He
mailed her some photographs of himself and his niece as babies, enclosing this
note: "Maybe it is just because they are both so pretty and have such
beautiful blond hair and blue eyes, but somehow whenever we see a picture of
either our niece or Joy, it always makes us think of the other one at the same
age."
Beth says, "When I showed the pictures to my mother, she said 'Oh my god!
They look exactly like her.' " (Beth sent me the pictures: The resemblance
is striking.)
Beth sent him a photo of Joy skiing and a videotape. Repository staffers passed
on the photograph but kept the videotape: Joy was too identifiable in it, they
said.
Donor White couldn't say much about himself in his letters—the repository
wouldn't permit it—but he told Beth he was semi-retired from science and that
he sometimes hoped that Joy would follow him into the field, since his niece
wasn't interested. Still, he added, "The main thing that we hope for Joy
is that she will be healthy and happy in whatever she decides to do. … We won't
make her choose a career before she finishes first grade. Nevertheless, I just
feel that she is going to do something special."
Eventually, Donor White wrote Beth that he hoped he could meet his daughter.
"In the back of our mind there is the thought that some day, some way, we
might get to make a future visit in person. In the meantime, please know you
are thought of very often, Joy, and thank you for letting us believe that we
really do have a small part in your life." That letter was signed,
"With all our love, Your adoptive grandparents."
In early 1997, not long after this note, repository administrator Anita Neff
sent a letter to Beth. Neff announced that the repository's directors had
decided to end the correspondence between her and Donor White. "A
unanimous decision was made to discontinue any further interaction between
donor and offspring as it breaks the rule of confidentiality. While this has
been the rule of the repository all along, we recognize that it has been bent
for you in the past," Neff wrote. "We simply cannot continue to share
Joy with the donor."
Beth and Joy lost Donor White, and Donor White lost them. Beth has been left
with some cards, a couple of photos, and a few sketchy facts. She knows roughly
when he was born and knows a bit about his scientific career. (Slate is not publishing these details
in order to protect Donor White from being identified against his will.) She
knows he had no children of his own but that he had at least 12 other children
through the repository, four girls and eight boys. And she believes that Joy is
his 13th. (How does she know this? Click here for an interesting digression.)
Last year, three years after she lost contact with Donor White, Beth finally
decided to tell Joy about her genetic father. Beth had divorced and remarried
and didn't want to keep the secret from her growing girl anymore. "I am a
nurse and I treat people all the time who die suddenly and too young. I did not
want to leave anything unsaid to Joy."
Beth read Joy one of the letters that Donor White had written to her and gave
Joy the Fisher-Price doll that Donor White had left her in 1991. "She was
very emotional about it. She was very touched."
Joy had believed that Beth's ex-husband was her father, but Beth says her
daughter was not surprised to learn that she had another dad, too. "She
loves [my ex-husband], but he is very different from her. I think it made sense
to her that there could be this other father too."
They don't talk too much about Donor White, Beth says—though she now jokingly
calls Joy "my little rocket scientist"—but Joy has told Beth she
thinks of Donor White "as being like Professor Dumbledore in the Harry
Potter books"—the good wizard who's a benevolent authority figure. Joy has
also "expressed curiosity about meeting him."
And that's why Beth called Slate.
When she saw the first Seed story, she seized the chance to
search for Donor White and for his dozen other kids. "I feel really
connected to that man. He has no children of his own, and he gave me this
wonderful gift."
She wants Donor White to find out about his daughter, to learn that she loves
ballet. That she is "kind of competitive." That she plays soccer and
"is all over the field." That she likes Harry Potter books. That she
is very pretty. That she "does well in all of her subjects, but social
science interests her most." That teachers like her but that she also has
lots of friends. That she is taking horseback riding lessons. That "she
has no fear." That "she puts her heart into life."
She wants to bring Donor White into her family and to bring Joy into his.
"I don't know exactly what kind of relationship we would have, but there
would be something—whatever he would be comfortable with."
Beth also hopes Joy can meet her half-sisters and half-brothers. "She
loves family, and it would be an answer to prayer for her to have contact with
siblings," Beth says.
To Donor White: If you would like to reconnect with your genetic
daughter, please contact David Plotz by e-mail at plotz@slate.com
or by phone at (202) 862-4889. I will treat your correspondence as
confidential.
To other parents who conceived
children using Donor White's sperm: If you would like to be in touch with your child's
half-sister Joy and Joy's mom, please e-mail me at plotz@slate.com
or call me at (202) 862-4889. All contacts will be considered confidential.
sidebar
Before Joy's birth, Dora Vaux sent Beth an article Donor White had written
under the pseudonym "R. White." The article, "The First of My 12
Children Will Soon Be Four," tells why Donor White agreed to give sperm to
the repository. He wrote that he and his wife had never been able to have their
own children. He also wrote that he couldn't shake the memory of his own
great-grandfather, who had fathered his only child just before going off to
fight and die in the Civil War. Donor White wrote that he'd had eight boys and
four girls through the repository, the first in 1986. (This would make Joy No.
13.)
Donor White also discussed how he felt about his sperm bank children.
The indirect success … is not like having
your own children, of course, and I will likely never be able to see any of
them in person, because I would be 75 years old before they become adults.
Moreover, many of these children will likely never know that their adopted
fathers are not their biological fathers. Still, I know these children are out
there somewhere, and they are thought about often. I have seen very pleasing
photographs of several of them, with their parents' permission, and have been
able to form my own mental images of others while running on the beach in the
quietness of the early morning. This is a rather poor substitute for having
one's own children, but it does provide a sense of continuity that was not present
before. In my view, a person's genes really belong to all of those many
ancestors from whence they came, and we are only allowed to borrow and make use
of them during our lifetimes. I have the satisfaction, then, of having been
able, in an anonymous way, to connect the past with the future in a continuous
line like a curve on a graph.
Still Searching for
Donor White (or Coral, or Fuchsia …)
The
latest on the "Nobel Prize sperm bank" investigation.
By David Plotz
Posted Wednesday, March 7, 2001, at 12:00 AM PT
Last week, Seed recounted the story of a woman's quest for Donor White, the
genetic father of her daughter and perhaps a dozen other children from the
Repository for Germinal Choice. (Read the story here.)
The woman, "Beth," had corresponded anonymously for years with Donor
White, but they lost touch in 1997 when the repository stopped forwarding their
mail. Donor White had told Beth he wanted to meet his daughter. Beth wants her
daughter to meet him. She also wants her daughter to meet her genetic
half-siblings, Donor White's other repository kids. So Beth invited Donor
White—and any family that had kids with Donor White's sperm—to contact Slate.
A week has passed, and, sadly, Donor White has not contacted us. Nor have his
other sperm bank kids or their parents. (We
invite them again to get in touch with Slate by e-mailing me at plotz@slate.com or calling me at (202) 862-4889. I will treat the
correspondence as confidential.)
But Slate has
heard from other repository mothers and donors who hope to find sperm bank kin:
Two mothers who had children using Donor
Fuchsia want to find other Donor Fuchsia families. (In case
you're wondering, these mothers don't know each other, but perhaps they will
soon.)
A mother who has a teen-age son from Donor
Coral is looking for other families that used his sperm.
A mother who had a son using Donor
Yellow is curious about his siblings and about the donor
himself.
Donor Orange, whose DNA
went to more than a dozen kids during the '90s, would like to meet his genetic
children and their parents.
Several other parents and donors would like to connect with repository
relatives, too, but they are still leery about sharing even their donor
identification colors.
If you are a parent, child, or donor who
wants to find repository relatives—especially if you're linked to Donors White,
Fuchsia, Coral, Yellow, or Orange—Slate wants to hear from you. Please e-mail me at plotz@slate.com
or call me at (202) 862-4889. All contacts will be considered confidential.
Dozens of sperm donors, mothers, and children from other sperm banks have also contacted Slate in hopes of finding relatives.
I'm sorry to say that we can't assist your search, but click here for other resources.
An Update
Many readers are curious about how many kids, parents, and donors have
responded to Slate's
request for help.
Six families have reached me by e-mail, telephone, or "The Fray." I
have located another four families using other sources. (I have also heard from
two women who tried and failed to conceive using Graham's prime sperm.) The
response has been much greater than I expected, because getting the families to
talk is delicate work. In most cases, I have talked only to parents—usually
mothers. They are understandably wary of the press. Their children are minors.
The parents want to shield them from interviews. In two cases, I have
communicated directly with kids, but none of that communication has been on the
record—yet.
These 10 families account for 15 of the 240-odd kids who were born from the
repository. They are certainly not a representative sample. The families are
self-selecting. They're the ones who are 1) willing to acknowledge that their
children came from a sperm bank; and 2) willing to talk about it to a reporter.
(Studies show that as many as 80 percent of parents who use sperm banks don't
tell their kids about it. These 15 kids probably represent a significant chunk
of the kids who know about their repository heritage.)
As for donors, six have e-mailed or called me, and I have a line on a seventh.
I have also e-mailed with two men who were invited to donate sperm, agreed to
do it, but then were rejected after medical background checks.
I don't know how many donors the repository recruited over its 20-year life,
but all signs suggest it wasn't a huge number. The California Cryobank, the
nation's largest sperm bank, offers women a choice of almost 200 donors. But
the repository never had more than a dozen men in its stable, and sometimes had
many fewer. (One mother tells me she had no choice: "Genius sperm"
was available from only one
donor when she applied.) The repository had a very hard time recruiting for
three main reasons, I suspect: It had received very negative press; it required
donor candidates to endure very onerous tests and paperwork; and it did not pay
donors.
Based on the evidence I've accumulated, it's a reasonable guess that the
repository used between 50 and 100 donors during its lifetime. So my sample
represents perhaps 10 percent of the total. (Again, it's small, self-selected,
and unrepresentative group.) The repository told most donors—at least in vague
terms—how popular their sperm was, so these donors have estimates about how
many kids were theirs. Together, the six seem to account for about 30 of the
repository's kids—slightly more than 10 percent of the total.
The pace of donor and parent contact is slowing. I heard from most of these
folks in the two weeks after the first story, and from only one or two per week
since. The total MSN/Slate
audience makes up perhaps 10 percent of the U.S. population, so the
"Seed" articles may have already reached most of the repository
parents, kids, and donors who would naturally see them. I hope not.
When are Slate readers
going to hear from all these interesting repository people, you ask? Good
question! So far Seed has done very little of what we promised to do in the
opening installment: tell how the repository kids turned out. Are they high
achievers? Are they "superbabies"? What kind of families do they come
from? Do their parents burden them with excessive expectations? Have their
sperm bank origins put a strain on father-child bonds? And what do the donors
think? After all these years and all these genetic kids, are they comfortable
with what they did?
In the next few weeks—relying on the people I've interviewed and hopefully more
to come—I will address these questions. I will also take sidetours into the
peculiar history of American sperm banks and the even more peculiar history of
American eugenics.
sidebar
Single Mothers by Choice has started a "sibling registry"
for children conceived by donor insemination. There is also a Yahoo! group in which donors and children discuss
searching for lost sperm bank relatives. And a Canadian group called Infertility Network advocates establishing a
national registry for sperm donors and children conceived from banked sperm.
sidebar
In a sidebar to an early Seed piece I discussed
the issue of fakery and explained why it hadn't been a problem yet.
It still hasn't been a problem. I have had to spend a little time weeding out
goofs and fakes. But no one has made a very credible effort to defraud us (I
think!). One person in the Fray pretended that 1) he was Steve Jobs of Apple;
and that 2) he, Steve Jobs, was the "Entrepreneur" donor I interviewed.
I violate no confidences when I say that 1) the Fray poster isn't Steve Jobs;
and 2) the Entrepreneur isn't Steve Jobs, either. Another Frayster pretended
briefly that he was a child from the repository, but he too was an obvious
joker.
How do I know that the donors and parents are legit? In an absolutist,
Cartesian way, I don't and I can't. The repository's records are private, and I
have no perfect way of verifying the stories I'm told.
But there are several reasons why I'm fairly certain about all my sources so
far. Most have sent me papers documenting their connection to the repository:
donor catalogs, instructions on sperm donation and insemination, correspondence
on repository letterhead. All have described repository staffers in detail and
know facts about the staffers that would be very difficult to learn absent
personal experience. And, finally, none has any obvious reason to lie: They
reap no benefit from telling me their story. They get no publicity (since their
identities are kept secret), no money, no nothing. They all hold respectable positions
in their community: Faking a connection to the repository would be at best
pointless, at worst self-destructive.
The Better Baby
Business
The Nobel sperm bank
wasn't the first scheme to breed "superbabies." The weird history of
"positive" eugenics.
By David Plotz
Posted Tuesday, March 13, 2001, at 8:30 PM PT
Reporters and scientists welcomed the Repository for Germinal Choice—the Nobel
Prize sperm bank—with gleeful derision. When Robert Graham announced in 1980
that his Nobel sperm would improve the world's "germ plasm" and slow
the onslaught of "retrograde humans," he was treated as a Rip Van
Winkle crank, someone who had snored through 40 years of eugenic disgrace.
By 1980, the "eugenics" Graham preached was an epithet, a bad dream.
Graham was a last gasp of a once enormous American eugenics movement, a
historical crusade that was half-odious, half-goofy. (To be fair to Graham, he
belonged with the goofs.)
America has tried to forget its forty-year affair with eugenics—for good
reason. As Daniel Kevles chronicles wonderfully in his 1985 history In the Name of Eugenics, the American
eugenic experiment compiled a mostly dismal record during the first four
decades of the 20th century. ("Eugenics," which means
"good in birth," arose as a movement in late-19th-century
England, popularized in particular by Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin.)
East Coast WASPs dominated American eugenics, and they feared that the
magnificent northern Europeans who built America were being swamped by masses
of genetically inferior Jews, Irish, Italians, and blacks. They were alarmed by
statistics showing that the poorest—and hence "least fit"—Americans
were bearing the most children.
In the teens and '20s, this paranoia fueled the "negative eugenics"
craze. Negative eugenicists were the authoritarians, believing government must
halt the propagation of undesirables. Congress and statehouses fell under their
spell, passing bill after eugenic bill. The 1924 immigration act choked off
immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Most state legislatures enacted
laws restricting marriage by "idiots," the mentally ill, and people
with venereal diseases. More than a dozen gave the state the power to sterilize
rapists, epileptics, drug addicts, alcoholics, the feeble-minded, and the
mentally ill. The Supreme Court endorsed this practice in the 1927 case Buck v. Bell, supporting forced
sterilization of a single mother—a "moral imbecile." Wrote Oliver
Wendell Holmes, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." The
United States sterilized more than 20,000 citizens during the first third of
the century.
(Nazi Germany embraced negative eugenics, extending it vilely. The Nazis
sterilized almost a quarter-million people deemed "unfit" for reasons
of health—often really for religion—and
eventually murdered more than 70,000 people in German asylums.)
The horrors of negative eugenics overshadowed the more benign side of the
movement: "positive eugenics." Rather than ordering vasectomies on
mental patients, positive eugenicists encouraged the fit (Cabots, Roosevelts,
etc.) to go forth and multiply. Of course, many eugenicists favored both
positive and negative approaches, and positive eugenics was infused with the
same WASP supremacist ideology as negative eugenics.
Still, positive eugenics was more silly than malicious in practice. In the
years leading up to the Great Depression, the American Eugenics Society
sponsored "Fitter Families for Future Firesides" contests at state
fairs. Families were prodded and poked and quizzed to determine which was most
"eugenic." (What was valued was never exactly clear. What kind of
"intelligence" or "health" was being measured?) In Kansas,
winners were paraded in cars through the fairgrounds under a banner reading "Kansas'
Best Crop." Some fairs featured a "human stock" tent—placed next
door to the livestock barn—that promoted the "science of human
husbandry."
Positive eugenics seeped into school curricula. College classes instructed
undergrads—especially women—to remember their patriotic duty to spawn well.
Popular advice books urged young adults to pick mates wisely to ensure the best
possible offspring. (Click here for a particularly ridiculous incident in
positive eugenic history: the 1928 "eugenic baby.")
Positive eugenics never inspired the same kind of legislative action that
negative eugenics did. The positive eugenicists were far less organized and far
less effective. I found only one American example of a government-backed
positive eugenics program. In the late '30s, the Pioneer Fund, an extremely
conservative, segregationist organization founded by a Massachusetts
millionaire, persuaded the U.S. Army to endorse a eugenic project. As Douglas
Blackmon chronicled in a wonderful Wall
Street Journal story, the Army Air Corps allowed the fund to pay a
$4,000 bonus to any corps officer with at least three children who fathered
another child in 1940. The fund believed that the corps officers, many of whom were
skilled pilots, were choice American stock (and all white, to boot). According
to Blackmon, 12 children qualified for the payment. In 1999, he tracked down
eight of them. They had grown up to be modestly successful. At least none were
criminals. (The Pioneer Fund scheme resembled contemporaneous positive eugenics
in Nazi Germany, which did have state-promoted baby-making. Click here for a brief discussion.)
The Great Depression—in which the "best" Americans helped cripple the
nation—slowed eugenic enthusiasm in the United States. World War II ended it.
The revelation of Nazi eugenic atrocities made the topic taboo.
Negative eugenics was utterly discredited, but positive eugenics didn't
entirely disappear. Its new champion was Hermann Muller, a idealist and
socialist who won the 1946 Nobel Prize in medicine for demonstrating that
radiation caused heritable mutations in fruit flies. After the war, Kevles
writes, Muller became alarmed about the buildup of mutations in the human gene
pool. Some harmful mutations were passed on from generation to generation, but
natural selection had ensured that the worst mutations were eliminated. People
who had them were rarely healthy enough to reproduce. But public health
advances now allowed folks with more mutations to survive and breed. Magnifying
this problem, Muller warned, were increasing radiation levels, which
accelerated mutation rates. In several generations, Muller predicted, the
accumulation of mutations would enfeeble mankind, turning us into pathetic,
degraded shadows.
The salvation, Muller preached, would be "germinal repositories." We
would collect and freeze sperm from distinguished, healthy men. This vital DNA
would be doled out to would-be mothers, preserving the vigor of the species.
(Muller believed that in the face of a mutation crisis, men would abandon their
selfish fixation on reproducing their own damaged genes in order to guarantee
their children's health. Muller's faith that men would act selflessly
highlights one of the great flaws of the Nobel sperm bank. Click here for an explanation of the flaw.)
Muller did not worry much about the health of the female eggs and made no
provisions for them. Roald Dahl wrote a short comic novel lampooning Muller's
idea. In My Uncle Oswald, the
hero travels the world tricking famous men—James Joyce, for instance—into
giving him sperm for a bank.
Muller's germinal repository idea languished on the fringe of acceptability
until millionaire Robert Graham agreed to fund it in the 1960s. Graham had long
been obsessed with positive eugenics. He proposed several schemes for
increasing the reproductive rate of the best Americans—subsidies for graduate
students who procreated; corporate sponsorship of fecund employees—but he was
most enraptured by the notion of germinal repositories.
Graham and Muller squabbled over whom their repository should recruit. Muller
favored selecting donors for intelligence and altruism. Graham cared only about
intelligence. So it was only after Muller died and Graham sold his eyeglasses
company that Graham could open his Nobel sperm bank. (You can read more about
the history of the Nobel sperm bank in this earlier Seed installment.)
Graham dreamed that every city would eventually have its own genius sperm bank,
but he couldn't have been more wrong. The idea bombed. Only two men followed
him into the genius semen business. Paul Smith, an ex-employee of Graham's,
runs a small eugenic sperm bank called Heredity Choice. (Click here for Smith's strange story.) And in the
early '90s, Floyd Kimble, a fabulously wealthy Ohio businessman, endowed his
"Foundation for the Continuity of Mankind" with $30 million. Kimble
shared Graham's fears of genetic decline and struck up a friendship with him,
and the name of the Kimble foundation paid homage to Graham's "Foundation
for the Advancement of Man." Kimble also gave Graham's foundation $400,000
in 1994.
Kimble's foundation was more Noah's ark than sperm bank: It planned to store
sperm—as well as plant seeds and animal sperm—in case of disaster or general
genetic degradation. It did not distribute the semen to clients. According to
Floyd's widow, Doris Kimble, "my husband believed we were losing a lot of
the better genetic traits of our fathers and forefathers." The foundation
collected sperm from 65 men and kept it in an old Spokane, Wash., bank vault—a bank, get it? The Kimble foundation is
dormant but still has its gigantic endowment. It also had an embarrassing race
scandal, which you can read more about here.
The Nobel sperm bank is dead, the Foundation for the Continuity of Man is
comatose, Heredity Choice is tiny. The notion that America must safeguard its
"germ plasm" sounds ridiculous.
Yet positive eugenics persists, reborn again
in a less goofy and probably more important form than ever. For Graham and for
eugenicists in the '20s, the goal was public health and national survival. The
goal of today's eugenics is consumer choice. We are entering an age of private
positive eugenics. Soon scientists will be able to manipulate embryonic
genes—perhaps eliminating diseases, increasing resistance to illness, even
augmenting intelligence. It will be done by apolitical doctors, not
conservative millionaires, and it will be done for the good of individual
patients, not for the good of society.
sidebar
In a recent Washington Post Magazine,
Arthur Allen recounted how newspapers went gaga over a "eugenic baby"
born to a rich New York widow in 1928. She had supposedly sought out the best
specimen of manhood and "coldly" coupled with him to ensure prime
offspring.
As Allen discovered, the story was bunk: The mother had gotten pregnant during
an affair with her best friend's husband. He was a notorious Communist. Her
family may have spread the eugenic baby myth as a cover story.
sidebar
According to Kevles, the Nazi government forgave loans made to couples who had
children. Some German cities paid bonuses to families with three or more
children. And the SS established lebensborn,
spas where pregnant wives and girlfriends of SS officers could go for special
treatment.
sidebar
Why did the Nobel sperm bank produce only a couple of hundred kids? And why are
so many of the mothers from the bank who contact me divorced? Here is one
tentative theory: The people most likely to use a Nobel sperm bank are people
who really believe in genes.
They expect the high-quality sperm to give them high-quality children. If they
didn't believe it, they would be satisfied with run-of-the-mill semen. They
prize nature over nurture.
But how does a man who believes in genes feel about a child who does not share
his genes? If you believe that genes rule a child, then you might not feel like
a father to a child that is genetically not your own. In other words, the men
most likely to believe in the principle of the Nobel sperm bank are the very
men who would be most alienated by a child from the sperm bank. I suspect that
problem alienated men from being clients: Because they believed in it, they
could not bear to do it.
For the same reason, it may also be no accident that almost all the parents who
have contacted me about their Nobel sperm bank kids are divorced mothers whose
ex-husbands have terrible relationships with their kids.
sidebar
Paul Smith is the great eccentric and true believer of the genius sperm bank
cause. He has been hooked on the sperm banking idea since he heard about
Hermann Muller in the early '60s.
"For 40 years I have had the feeling I am doing something that will make a
difference. It is not a matter of changing the whole profile of genetics in the
U.S. But it is providing a few more potentially great people, one genome at a
time."
Smith came to Graham after spending more than 10 years in exile in England
fleeing the Vietnam draft. When Graham jettisoned him from the repository,
Smith never even considered abandoning sperm banking. He took the repository
donors with him and started Heredity Choice, which he and his wife now run out
of their desert home in Pearblossom, Calif.—a 10-acre spread shared with the
border collies and huskies they breed and the potbellied pigs they have
rescued. (His wife, Adonna Frankel, is committed to the cause as well. She was
a client of Heredity Choice before they met: She froze embryos made from her
eggs and Heredity Choice's genius sperm. She and Smith hope to use those
embryos to have their own kids.)
Smith—who looks like a gaunter version of Ed Harris, if such a thing is
possible—has a very peculiar manner. He frequently zones out during
conversation or starts talking about an unrelated subject. When it happens, his
wife gives him a friendly tug and yanks him back to earth. Still, he's very
charming, mostly because he is the only person associated with the repository
who seems to have a sense of humor.
Smith estimates that Heredity Choice has produced "hundreds of kids, many
more than the repository did."
It is, however, the only sperm bank the state of California has ever closed.
The state tissue bank inspection unit forced Smith to shut Heredity Choice a
few years ago because he had no running water for his lab and was storing human
and dog semen together.
Smith insists that he does not need running water because he uses purified
water, and that the dog/human charge has been sensationalized. He claims he had
only one set of dog semen samples, they were kept in a separate liquid nitrogen
tank, and he stored them in a different kind of vial.
All the same, the image of dog and human sperm mingling sticks in the brain.
Smith didn't help matters when he told reporters that "none of my clients
has ever had a puppy." The reporters did not get the joke.
The shutdown didn't deter Smith. He simply transferred his sperm storage to
Nevada, which has no regulations about sperm banking.
Smith accepts that the world has not embraced his cause. He once hoped that
others would follow him into genius sperm banking, but no one has. He has only
eight donors for Heredity Choice because it is too expensive to find and test
new ones. Still, he hasn't lost his good cheer: At the end of our interview, as
I was saying goodbye, he and Adonna asked me to put them in touch with Bill
Gates. They would like him as a donor. "I don't think much of his
operating system," Smith said, "but I would like his sperm."
sidebar
In the mid-'90s, Floyd Kimble hired Dora Vaux, one of Graham's longtime
employees, to run the Foundation for the Continuity of Mankind. Vaux told the
Spokane newspaper that white "racial purity" was a goal of the sperm
bank and that it would not accept specimens from blacks or gays. In the same
article, Doris Kimble declared that the bank would never store sperm from
blacks and whites together.
Doris Kimble today denies that her late husband's foundation was white
supremacist. She insists that they chose "seeds of healthy specimens,
genetically strong. It does not matter what your background was." The
foundation collected only from whites because "only white sperm donors
volunteered," she says.
Floyd Kimble died in 1998, and Vaux died a year later. The small semen
collection has not been expanded since, though the manager still mails out
glossy brochures advertising the foundation: "Preserving Today for the
World Tomorrow." Doris Kimble says Floyd Kimble left money for the
foundation in his will—she won't say how much—and she hopes to reactivate it
once her husband's estate is settled.
The Nobel Sperm Bank Celebrity
Since
his birth, brilliant, precocious Doron Blake has symbolized the Repository for
Germinal Choice. Now the "superbaby" is an 18-year-old college
freshman, and he's longing to be normal.
By David Plotz
Posted Friday, March 16, 2001, at 5:30 PM PT
As a newborn, Doron Blake could mark time to classical music with his hands. By
age 2, he was using a computer. By kindergarten, he was reading Hamlet and learning algebra. At age 6,
his IQ measured 180—"or something like that. That's what the guy
hypothesized. I wouldn't finish the test. I was so bored with it."
"I was [Robert Graham's] emblem. I was the boy with the high IQ who was
not screwed up. I was his ideal result."
Blake recounts all this matter-of-factly, without egotism. His voice is filled
with the boredom of 1,000 repetitions—to 60
Minutes, to Japanese TV, to British tabloids. Now 18 years old,
Doron is the Nobel sperm bank quote machine, the only one of the 240-odd repository kids who
talks to reporters. (He and his mom, Afton, do it for money: Click here for an explanation of how they control
the press and for an account of their negotiations with Slate—that is, what we did when they
asked us for cash. Read it, it's interesting.)
Till recently, the Blakes' sperm-and-pony show for reporters essentially consisted
of chronicling Doron's accomplishments. The obvious theme: "Look, the
superbaby from the super sperm bank is really super!" Doron seemed to
vindicate Graham's grand promises about his sperm bank. A 180 IQ shuts up the
skeptics.
But now Doron has reached adulthood, and he is giving the story a new ending.
He bears the scars of having been expected to perform since he was in diapers.
He resents the endless examination and probing he has endured. The Doron Blake
Story, as told by Doron Blake, does not conclude with genetics triumphant nor
does it sing glory to the Repository for Germinal Choice.
"I was his ideal result," Doron says, but then he goes on: "It
was a screwed-up idea, making genius people. 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 in my life. The thing I like best about myself is not that I'm
smart but that I care about people and try to make other people's lives better.
I don't think you can breed for good people."
Doron Blake is a puzzle. On the one hand, he is the very model of the patchouli
college student—that irksome guy in your freshman dorm who burned incense at
all hours and sang the most godawful folk songs. He's a vegetarian. He wears a
wispy mustache and a soul patch. He is majoring in comparative religion and
describes his own spiritual beliefs as a hodgepodge of Wicca, Taoism, and
Buddhism. He plays piano, guitar, and sitar. For fun, he is reading the Harry
Potter books and the Narnia series.
He's shy. He's been at Reed College for six months and hasn't made any friends.
His six friends—including the woman he considers his soul mate—are all back
East, and he misses them terribly. He stutters. He insists he is uncomfortable
talking to strangers (though he seems perfectly comfortable talking to me for
hours about every aspect of his life).
Doron suffers from the sense he is being judged, all the time (and h