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 here I am,
judging again). Since he was a baby—a superbaby—reporters have been expecting
him to shine. When I ask him what movies and books he likes, I can hear the
hesitation in his voice: Any answer—too highbrow, too lowbrow, too
middlebrow—could backfire. ("What, the Einstein kid reads children's books?"
or "So, the little genius baby likes Derrida. What a pretentious
snotnose!")
"Most of being a prodigy was negative. People have always been saying
'prodigy sperm child' all my life. But I am not that wonderful at anything. You
feel a lot of pressure because you don't want to let people down, or you don't
really feel free to be what you want to be.
"I don't feel safe with people I don't know, and I don't feel very
confident with others. That may be the effect of having things expected of
me."
Perhaps because he's afraid of being judged, he relentlessly emphasizes his own
lack of achievement. Again and again he tells me, "I have never done
anything special."
Yet it would be a mistake to take Doron at his word. His self-deprecating
sermons are rhetorical masterpieces. He attempts to turn himself off, to reduce
himself, yet the very effort he makes to do it is extraordinary. He is quick as
a whip. He burns with eloquence and a brutal honesty. He is astonishingly
perceptive. Is he an unremarkable kid who is expected to be remarkable? Or a
remarkable one who is trying to be unremarkable? Or both, perhaps?
The Repository for Germinal Choice was supposed to prove the importance of
nature over nurture. Doron's life proves the opposite. The best way to understand
him is to understand nurture—in the form of a loving, too-loving, mother and a
public, too-public, childhood.
Afton Blake is an odd duck. She is a "transpersonal psychologist"
with a small Los Angeles practice. She's a hippie. She breeds Salukis. (Dog-breeding
is a habit shared by several folks connected to the repository, which I find
curious. But Afton insists her quest to breed better dogs has no connection at
all to her quest to have a better baby.)
She is socially awkward, a self-proclaimed recluse. This presents a defining
paradox of her character, a paradox that she shares with her son: She is
misanthropic and private. Yet she discusses with a stranger (me) the most
intimate details of her own life and Doron's.
In the early '80s, when she was nearing 40 and unmarried, Afton decided she
wanted a child. After rejecting a couple of Southern California sperm banks
because they told her almost nothing about their donors, she settled on the
Repository for Germinal Choice, which detailed donors' professions,
achievements, health, interests, looks. The repository rejected all unmarried
women as a matter of policy, but Blake somehow snuck past its checks. She tried
a Nobel Prize winner's sperm at first, but she didn't get pregnant.
Then she opted for Red No. 28. His donor bio said he taught hard science at a
major university, won prizes performing classical music, had a narrow, very
handsome face, liked swimming, and suffered slightly from hemorrhoids.
She got pregnant, and in August 1982, her son was born, the repository's second
child. She named him Doron, Greek for "gift," and she has worshipped
him since like a divinity. Doron is her universe: She says he is the only
person she ever wants to spend time with. "She made me the center of
everything and obliterated everything else in the process," says Doron
with characteristic directness.
Afton indulged him. She breastfed him till he was 6. She never restricted him
in the matter of manners. For years, he would not sit down and eat dinner with
her, she says, a bit regretfully. They were the closest of friends till he hit
adolescence. She encouraged any interest he had, never judged him, never
criticized him. There were no rules—not that he ever would have heeded them
anyway: "I was pigheaded," Doron says.
Afton was not the kind of parent you'd expect from the Nobel Sperm bank. She
wasn't forcing little Doron to study ancient Greek then take harp lessons on
weekends. Quite the opposite. Doron learned because he loved it. Afton enrolled
him in "anti-intellectual" preschool, but he demanded more rigor. He
soon revealed himself to be a math prodigy and a talented musician. (Is this
DNA at work? These were Donor Red's skills, but not Afton's.) Doron qualified
for a Los Angeles school for the gifted then won a full scholarship to Phillips
Exeter in New Hampshire, one of the nation's best high schools. Repository
founder Graham delighted in every evidence of Doron's brightness. He huzzahed
Doron as his pride and joy, sending the boy books and treating the Blakes to
dinner.
How do we know all this? Because Afton turned her son's life into the Truman
Show—brainiac version. She did Good Morning
America when he was a newborn and posed him for the cover of Mother Jones in a sailor suit when he was
1. California magazine rode the
school bus with him a few years later. Prime
Time Live followed him to Exeter, so did 60 Minutes. Foreign TV crews visited the
house. British tabloid journalists stopped by his dorm. Doron estimates he has
done 100 interviews in his 18 years. His love life has been discussed in print.
So have his difficulty making friends, his stammer, his tendency (as a lad) to
brag about his IQ.
So, why did the reclusive Afton permit her child such a public life? Afton is
both a psychologist and a child of the '60s: She believes emphatically in
openness. She never thought she had anything to hide (which is why Doron has
always known he was a sperm-bank baby). She also believes it is her obligation
to tell the world that using a sperm bank is great. Plus, she was often
strapped for cash, and the media bucks helped.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to Afton that this media frenzy might stunt
her son. It has occurred to Doron. "It would have been much better if Mom
had not had me microprobed. It was not the best thing for me to grow up in the
spotlight. This is something I realized recently. I never enjoyed the media
appearances, and I did not really understand the effects on me till now,"
he says.
"I have always been a shy, spend-time-alone kind of person, and being in
the public has made me very uncomfortable. It is one reason why now I feel that
people are not going to like me. I always feel like people are examining me and
probing me. It is much better for kids to grow up in a safe environment."
Indeed, the other repository families who have contacted me about Seed are
horrified by what has happened to Doron. All cite Doron's exposure as the
reason they crave anonymity.
(So, why does Doron still talk to reporters? He needs the cash, and I think he
figures the damage has been done—the story is out there. He also thinks he has
a duty to educate the public about sperm-bank kids, to show they are like
everyone else.)
Despite Doron's annoyance at being overexposed, he's not at all mopey or
depressed. He is fiercely independent. Though he says he fears being judged, he
actually seems wonderfully indifferent to what's expected of him. He's a
cheerful contrarian. He has struck out entirely on his own, and he seems very
happy with himself.
His mother wants to preserve the tight bonds of his childhood, but he fights
her off. ("She has been a great mother up until now, but she does not know
how to let go," he grumps.) He was supposed to be a math-science whiz, but
he has shucked those subjects for ones closer to his heart, music and religion.
(Though he concedes that "if I had not been a math-science genius as a
kid, maybe I would have been drawn to math and science now.") He rejected
the usual-suspect colleges for Exeter grads—Harvard, Yale, etc. Reed was the
only school he even applied to.
And now that he has got to Reed, he won't conform to its culture. Doron exudes
a sweet, old-time idealism. He says his image of Reed was a "dream of
loving hippiesque people." Instead, he says, it's more "punk than
hippie. It's full of people who, rather than wanting to change the world in a
positive way, say the world sucks." There is too much drinking, too much
smoking, too many drugs. He is thinking of transferring, maybe to Bates in
Maine, or Evergreen in Washington state—somewhere where there are more people
"filled with love."
Doron possesses a disconcerting uncuriosity about his origins. He certainly
doesn't resent the repository. He is happy to be a sperm-bank baby, and he is
emphatic that parents who use banks must tell their kids where they come from.
"It was never a big deal for me. But if I had been sat down when I was 12
and told, 'Doron, the man you think is your father is not your father,' told
that I had been lied to my entire life, that would have been awful."
He also doesn't mind that he never had a father, except insofar as a father
would have helped him understand men. "I am not a masculine, macho guy.
Maybe it would have been good to have more experience relating to men."
But he really doesn't want to know about his genetic father. His father's DNA
may help him think quickly, he says, but what he is, fundamentally,
comes from how his mother raised him.
I find his lack of inquisitiveness amazing. A couple of years ago the BBC
proposed a family reunion to the Blakes. They had found the DNA dad—Afton Blake
knows who he is, and I suspect she tipped them off. A camera crew visited Doron
at Exeter and showed him an article about his father. They asked Doron if he
wanted to meet the man. Doron says he told them that he would, but didn't care
one way or another. How little did it register? Doron swears, and I think I
believe him, that he doesn't even remember the man's name. "I think it was
John, and he was a computer scientist of some sort." The reunion never happened.
"He is not part of my life. He has no place in my life whatsoever. He is
no more than a stranger. Genes have never been important to me. Family is the
people you love."
Robert Graham died when Doron was in high school. It is hard to know what the
repository's creator would have made of his former darling. Doron is smart and
well-spoken and direct, qualities Graham would admire. Yet Graham prized
rationality and scorned emotion. He said he hoped his sperm-bank kids would
make great scientific discoveries. Doron has disavowed the hard sciences for
spirituality. Graham was uninterested in art; Doron lives through his music.
Graham recruited athletic donors; Doron dislikes competitive sports. Graham
believed his sperm-bank kids should change the world; Doron's ambition is to
return to Exeter, the place he was happiest, and teach there. (That would be a
noble career, but not a Nobel one.)
Doron is using his great brain in the most subversive way possible: His
wonderful neurons deny all that Graham preached about genetics and
intelligence. The power of Doron's mind vindicates Graham. The thoughts in
Doron's mind reject him.
His genes, I suppose, have made Doron smart. His mother's love has made him an
enthusiast of music and books and religion. But his public life—in the form of
TV cameras and articles like this one, in the form of expectations that he be
brilliant and scientific and scintillating—have made Doron resistant. He
resists being a prodigy, resists being a scientist, resists being an apologist
for the repository. He resists his great expectations, and it's hard not to
admire him for it. It is not simply growing up with a high IQ and a devoted
mother that has made Doron what he is. It is growing up in public.
sidebar
There is a repository family in New York that sometimes talks to reporters. Its
three kids are all under 18. They speak to the press only sporadically and only
with their parents' permission. This family has not responded to my numerous
queries.
sidebar
The Blakes give American journalists ethical hives. I am still scratching mine.
The problem: They demand payment.
In Doron's early years, Afton did interviews for free. But over time it became
a chore, disrupting her life and Doron's. She realized that Doron's story was a
rare and precious commodity and saw no reason to give it free to any journalist
who came knocking. So, she started charging, and now they both do. Doron uses
the cash to pay off college loans and buy textbooks. It is hard to argue with
their logic.
Foreign press outlets have happily accommodated them—rules about source payment
are looser overseas. Japanese, Brits, and Germans are especially fascinated by
the genius-baby story. These TV crews and tab reporters give Doron as much as
$1,500 for an interview, and they pay Afton a fair chunk for her time, too.
Most American media won't pay sources, but still, they usually find a way to
satisfy the Blakes. 60 Minutes
repeatedly flew Afton from Los Angeles to New Hampshire to visit Doron at
boarding school and housed her at top-notch hotels. One crew ostensibly
"rented" Afton's house in exchange for an interview. She is a
psychologist, so other reporters have booked her for a therapy sessions at $160
an hour.
None of these outlets disclose that they've paid the Blakes. But since Seed is
a transparent project, I will. Here's what happened: When I finally reached
Afton Blake, she told me her requirement of cash payment. I discussed it with
my editors, and we decided that we would not pay (partly because payment
encourages a source to embellish, but mostly because if everyone demanded cash,
we would go bankrupt. Though Slate
has paid a source before: Scott Shuger gave a call girl $500 to interview her
for his story on Internet prostitution. Shuger
explained why journalistic payola can be legit in this recent Los Angeles Times op-ed.)
I told Afton we wouldn't pay but asked if she had any other ideas for
compensation. She suggested I fly her up to Portland to visit Doron at college.
I probably would have done this, but thought of a simpler scheme: I was
visiting Los Angeles the next week and proposed taking her out to a nice
dinner. Taking a source out to dinner is standard practice—even the high
priests of journalism OK dinners. She agreed—a bit reluctantly. (As it turned
out, the only time we could meet was Valentine's Day, and the only restaurant
that had an available reservation was a romantic Italian place. We were the
only noncouple in the joint. I had the heart-shaped ravioli. She had the
lobster. The bill: $140.)
Doron Blake was a bit trickier. When I finally reached him by e-mail, he was
receptive to the Seed project but wouldn't set aside his payment demand. I knew
his best friend still attends boarding school in New Hampshire, so I proposed
that Slate fly Doron
east so that he could visit his friend and I could meet him. That way he would
get compensation he really wanted, and I could pretend I wasn't paying him. My
convoluted ethical justification: I would have to fly cross-country if I wanted
to meet him. So, why not fly him instead? The ticket would cost Slate the same amount in either case.
In fact, Slate would
save money if we flew Doron east, because I wouldn't have a Portland hotel
bill.
He happily agreed but said he couldn't come east till April. Later he realized
he couldn't come till school ended in May. But I needed to talk to him before
that, so I interviewed him over the phone last week.
Which leads me reluctantly to the conclusion that the end result of all my
scheming is nothing more than a straight payoff. I am giving him a round-trip
airline ticket, and I accrue no journalistic benefit from it, because I won't
actually meet him in Newark Airport till long after this story.
No Nobels, One "Failure," a Few
Regrets
How did the genius
sperm-bank donors turn out?
By David Plotz
Posted Friday, March 30, 2001, at 12:00 AM PT
During the past two months, more than a dozen families and donors from the
Repository for Germinal Choice have
contacted Slate to tell us their stories and,
sometimes, ask our help in finding sperm-bank kin. But the flow is drying up.
We haven't heard from anyone new in a few weeks, and I suspect we may have
reached everyone we can through Slate. (Click here for explanation why.) So it's time to draw
the first conclusions—extremely tentative, unscientific ones—about the Nobel
sperm bank's babies, parents, and donors. This piece will examine what the
donors are like. Coming installments will study parents and kids and explore
how the repository changed the sperm-bank industry.
(Important note: This does not mean the Seed project is folding its tents. Slate will continue to pursue several promising leads; to
troll in other places for repository kids, families, and donors; and to try to
unite families and donors who are looking for each other—see "A
Mother Searches for 'Donor White.' " We will keep
publishing updates as we learn more. So if you have a connection to the
Repository for Germinal Choice—whether as a child, parent, donor, or
employee—and you would like to share your story anonymously, please contact me
by e-mail at plotz@slate.com or by phone at (202) 862-4889.)
When I started working on Seed, I thought there was one mystery to solve: Who
are the children from the Nobel sperm bank, and how did they turn out? But I
soon found a second puzzle: Who are the donors to the Nobel sperm bank, and how
did they turn out? After all, you can't judge whether "genius" genes
affected the sperm-bank babies unless you know something about the genes they
got. Were they getting DNA from the most brilliant minds in the country or from
regular Joes? I was also curious to learn how the donors feel about what they
did: Do they regret it? Do they think about it? Do they feel their
"kids" to be their own? It turned out that Graham's donors were not
exactly whom I expected, and they have not turned out as I expected.
As I reported in an earlier story, Graham's
alleged "Nobel Prize sperm bank" was nothing of the sort. He
recruited only three Nobelists—notably transistor inventor William Shockley—and
none of their seed ever found purchase. When he realized Nobelists wouldn't
cooperate, Graham settled for what he could get: younger scientists, the
occasional businessman, and a couple of Olympic athletes. In the '90s, when
that donor pool was drying up, he hit up promising graduate students and men he
found in "Who's Who."
Seven men recruited by Graham contacted me. Of them, five donated successfully. Graham dropped
the other two men for unspecified medical reasons. The five successful donors
seem to account for about 30 of the 215 kids born to the repository. I located
a sixth successful donor—responsible for approximately a dozen offspring—but he
declined to be interviewed.
Of course my sample is not representative. These donors chose to contact me. I
have no idea how the Slate Seven compare to the 50 or 100 other
donors who did not contact me. I suspect that the Slatesters are younger. Most
of them donated in the late '80s and '90s, and only one was in the repository's
first donor stable. (These younger men may have found me because they are more
likely to be online and see Slate.)
The Slate sample reflects Graham's constrained
ambitions. The Slate Seven were bright but not Olympian when
Graham tapped them. Two were child prodigies who had earned advanced scientific
degrees at precocious ages. Two were promising graduate students. One was a
rising businessman. (See " 'The Entrepreneur' Speaks.")
Another was a political activist who shared Graham's conservative views. One
counseled troubled kids. They were impressive, but certainly not the most
celebrated and accomplished men of the age.
Several of them note, in fact, that Graham seemed almost desperate when he
recruited them. He told them that most of the men he approached rejected him
and that he was having a hard time keeping his cryobank stocked. Graham was so
strapped for geniuses that he even accepted a volunteer, a donor who asks to be
called the "Average Guy." Click here to read about his peculiar experience,
including the funniest story I've heard about the repository.
Why did the donors cooperate with Graham's eugenic scheme? Almost all cite the
same four reasons. It was a Darwinian fantasy come to life. None was a father
at the time he donated, and most welcomed the idea of having kids without
responsibility for them. "I just felt some drive to reproduce, and this
was a way to express that drive without being a parent. It was a selfish
act—the ultimate selfish act," says the Average Guy.
Another donor says, "I thought it was a little dream come true. I could
have children and still have my life, and have the sense that I did something
productive before I died."
They also donated because Graham flattered them. Most were gratified to be
included in such a (purportedly) elite group. Graham flew around the country to
close the sale with donors. He really buttered them up. He studied their work,
quizzed them about it, and listened attentively to them. "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," says the Entrepreneur. "Even though I knew it was
not going to make much of a difference, I was happy that Graham was
happy."
Only one of the Slate Seven shared Graham's fascination
with eugenics, but most sympathized generally with his goals. They agreed that
genes matter, and that a child would benefit from the DNA they could pass on.
"I can solve relatively complex problems. If there is a better chance that
offspring of mine will be able to solve problems, that's a good thing. So I was
happy to help parents," says a donor who is now a professor. "I like
the idea of producing more intelligent people. After all, if you could produce
one person who could change the world as much as Shockley did, that would be
worth it."
(The Average Guy dissents, arguing that Graham should have selected for
altruism rather than intelligence and success. It was the interview Slate published with the
Entrepreneur, in fact, that confirmed to the Average Guy that Graham chose
badly. "Do we want people who will spend their lives on self-promotion and
greed? Is it good to provide the world with more people like him?" says
Average Guy.)
Altruism was their last-but-not-least reason for donating. The donors
recognized that even if their offspring were not Shockleys, at least they could
give some women with infertile husbands the kids they craved. "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?" says Entrepreneur.
So that is what the Slate Seven were. What are they now? There
are no Nobels and no criminals. All of them seem smart and engaged in the
world. Most write a good e-mail and talk a good game on the phone. Two are
quite prominent. The rising young businessman became a fabulously successful
middle-aged businessman. The emerging political activist has become a
semi-famous, sometimes controversial political activist. The two promising
graduate students are now junior professors at decent universities. One of the
prodigies has retired from a successful career in the intelligence trade to do
consulting and muck about with high I.Q. organizations (groups like Mensa, but
higher I.Q.'s required). The Average Guy has returned to grad school, where
he's finishing a degree in environmental policy. Most of the Slate Seven remain connected to hard
science, which would please Graham, who valued science and scorned just about
everything else.
The second child prodigy, who has abandoned hard science, has transformed most
radically. He donated in the early '80s when he was a math whiz. Today he
writes, "In many respects I feel I am a failure. The closest I have come
to conventional success was when I made my living writing term papers for rich
kids at Columbia, NYU, etc." But I don't think he really feels like a
failure: He has just discarded the notion that intelligence, especially
analytical intelligence, is an important measure of life. He has abandoned math
and academia to become an artisan. "I have gone from being an intellectual
whore to … I dunno what … I will never win a Nobel Prize, but I don't care. I
will never make any 'great' contribution to science. No matter. I have come to
terms with myself and who I am. This is the best part of growing old."
Some other donors, too, seem to be grappling with the burden of expectation.
Several seem conscious of how well they have done in their profession versus
how well a "genius donor" ought to have done. (In one sense, the
burden of performance weighs more heavily on the genius donors than on the
kids. The donors know they were supposed to be extremely accomplished, while
most of the kids don't.)
Most of the donors have something unusual in common: an unsteady personal life.
The vast majority of men their age are married and the vast majority have
children. Yet only two of the seven, I believe, are married. Only three have
their own (non-repository) children. Only one of the fathers is married to the
mother of his child. (At least two men had relationships that foundered in part
because the woman desired children. "She wanted to have children and I did
not. But sometimes I would be in the next bedroom donating sperm. She did not
try to stop me, but she was not happy about it," says Average Guy.)
I can't tell if this rockiness reflects sample bias or a deeper similarity
among all repository donors (or even among all smart men). It may be that
donors who don't have steady relationships or kids are more likely to contact
me: They may be curious about their other genetic
family. Donors with solid families, by contrast, may not think as much about
their repository service.
Or perhaps there was a subtle selfishness among repository donors generally:
Men who gave to such an ego-massaging sperm bank may tend to be more
self-centered and thus less likely to maintain relationships. (Several of these
donors, remember, say they gave so that they could pass on their genes without
being inconvenienced by the actual work of fatherhood.) But this is all wild
speculation.
Most of the Slate Seven
remember their "work" for Graham with satisfaction. A couple are
purely happy about it. They think fondly about any genetic kids. A couple are
pleased with the venture in an intellectual way: They don't think much about
any kids but praise Graham's goals. A couple feel slightly embarrassed by what
they did. None thinks of himself as a father to the bank children. Even those
who believe most strongly in heritability insist that fathers are made by
nurture, not nature. Even so, all of them expressed some enthusiasm at the
prospect of meeting their biological offspring, though they worry about
tampering with the kids' families.
The Average Guy has the most perverse and complicated feelings about being a
donor. He has kept obsessive track of his repository kids. He took notes every
time a repository staffer contacted him to report a birth, allowing him to
figure out his offspring's birthdays and sexes. He corresponded—anonymously
through the repository—with one mother who used his sperm. Though the
repository eliminated identifying information from the letters, he was able to
figure out the first names and professions of her and her husband, as well as
where they lived. (How did he find their hometown? you ask. The parents sent
him a studio photo of their daughter: He searched photo studio catalogs to find
the studio that used the logo embossed on the frame. Voilà! It was one in … I'm not telling.
He showed me the photo: The girl's resemblance to Average Guy is astonishing.)
But despite his obsessive record keeping, Average Guy says he is often ashamed
of what he has done. He is chagrined that he has selfishly avoided
responsibility for raising kids. And he feels that spawning more than a dozen
rugrats contradicts his own environmentalist ethos. "I am concerned about
overpopulation and America's destructive appetite for resources. I have
contributed to this problem in a big way by creating so many new
consumers."
In one final way, the donors seem very much alike. All sound blue when they
discuss their genetic offspring. They seem sad that they have kids they can't
ever meet, can't watch grow up, can't ever help. They understand the melancholy
reality of sperm donation. It's fatherhood without the responsibility, but also
fatherhood without the delight.
sidebar
Slate reaches a
few million people in the United States every month. MSN—which publishes some Slate headlines—reaches about 20
percent of the U.S. population. But since the Seed headlines have only been on
MSN a few times, I would guess that the vast majority of MSN's audience missed
them. So it's hard to imagine that even 5 percent of Americans have seen Seed.
But we have already heard from the parents of more than 5 percent of the kids
and donors who fathered more than 10 percent of the kids. So if anything, Seed
has located more repository families and donors than we reasonably could have
expected to (especially since the vast majority of sperm-bank parents never
tell kids about their origins, and hence are highly unlikely to have contacted Slate).
sidebar
For some reason I still can't understand, I wrongly counted six successful
donors in my last update. In fact, I have interviewed only
five successful donors and two unsuccessful ones.
sidebar
The Average Guy was the donor who counseled troubled kids. He had been a sperm
donor in his home state then moved to Alaska. He wanted to keep donating but
couldn't find a bank nearby. He researched and found that the repository was
the only U.S. sperm bank that allowed donors to contribute from their own
homes. (Donors could ship the samples to California in liquid nitrogen tanks.)
"I thought, 'Wouldn't it be cool if I could be a Nobel sperm donor?'
" he says. The Average Guy called the repository to offer his services. He
managed to persuade Graham he had the intellectual chops: "I told Graham
that I had gotten 800 on the math section of the GRE, that my uncle had worked
on the moon project, that several ancestors had been presidential appointees,
that a great-uncle had finished third in the Indianapolis 500. It was a sales
job."
The Average Guy became perhaps the most diligent of Graham's men, fathering at
least a dozen and perhaps as many as 17 kids in the early '90s. His enthusiasm
once put him in an awkward spot. The Average Guy carefully observed the rules
for handling semen samples at home. The repository instructed home donors to
place samples in their freezer to cool them down slowly, and only transfer them
to liquid nitrogen after that pre-icing. Says Average Guy:
I was moving from one apartment to another down the hall, and I was in the
middle of processing specimens. They were in the freezer of my old apartment. I
wanted to make sure the electricity was hooked up in the new apartment so that
the freezer would be working when I transferred the samples. I called the power
company, and I didn't want to explain too much, so I told them that I had
"human specimens" in my freezer and wanted to make sure they were not
damaged when I moved. The power company lady seemed taken aback, but she was
very nice and confirmed that the power was on. I hung up.
Ten minutes later the police were at my door. The officer wanted to come in and
check the freezer to see that I didn't have body parts in it. I explained that
the "human specimens" were sperm donations. It was very embarrassing.
Do "Superbabies" Have Super
Parents?
By David Plotz
Posted Friday, April 13, 2001, at 5:30 PM PT
The last Seed installment examined how some of the Repository for Germinal
Choice's donors turned out, and a forthcoming one
will study how some of the kids grew. Today it's the parents' turn.
Here is what parents who used the repository told me about their progeny:
"My son is a genius. He's beyond a
genius!"
"They test off the top of the
charts."
"This kid is unbelievable.…Now he's
interested in quantum theory."
"4.0"
"4.0"
"4.0"
"He's movie-star handsome.…He's a
math-science genius.…His coach says he thinks he's Olympic caliber."
It is an iron law of parenting, whether the sperm that made your child came
from the Nobel sperm bank across the country or from the no-good dropout across
the street: You will swell with pride about your tots' achievements.
But besides their innate pride, are the repository parents just like other
mothers and fathers? What kind of folks patronize a genius sperm bank? Are they
extrasmart? Do they expect too much from their genetically enhanced kids? How
does using such a bank alter the relationship between wives and husbands? Or
between (nonbiological) fathers and kids? Would the parents do it again?
Slate reached nine
families that used the repository. They have 14 children among them, ages 6 to
19. This represents about 6 percent of the total repository output. (Two women
who tried and failed to get pregnant using repository semen also contacted me.)
Four sets of parents are divorced, and four are still married (though one of
those couples is estranged). One mother, Afton Blake, has never been married.
(Click here to read about Afton and her son, Doron,
the Nobel sperm bank's celebrities.) Click here for some more quick demographics about
the Slate group.
Pause for the usual caveat: This is not a representative sample. These parents
are largely self-selected. I don't know how they compare to the vast majority
of repository parents I haven't heard from. This is not science: It is
anecdote.
Why did the parents choose the repository? They couldn't get pregnant because
the husband was sterile, often because of an earlier vasectomy, sometimes
because of general ill health, in one case because of Vietnam War wounds.
Several heard about the bank from the Los
Angeles Times, which wrote several stories about it in the early
'80s. One saw it advertised in the Yellow Pages. Several were referred by their
fertility doctors.
These parents were not eugenicists. Only one, Afton Blake, knew much about
Robert Graham and his eugenic philosophy. None of the other Slate parents was even aware of the
political controversy surrounding the repository. Today, none expresses much
enthusiasm for Graham's grand goal to breed future leaders and scientists.
This does not mean they weren't hoping for intelligent children: They were.
They don't believe in eugenic planning for society, but they certainly believe
in genetics. They are certain that good genes help. And genes contribute to
(though don't control) intelligence. "My mother told me that if you ever
have children, choose a good specimen. So I chose a good specimen," says
"Liza," a doctor. (She values intelligence enough that she markets an
"IQ Maximizer" extract to her patients.) But most, including Liza,
also insist that they weren't angling for a mini-Nobelist. "They never
told me I was going to have some kind of supergenius baby, and I didn't expect
one. That would be silly," Liza continues. She just hoped to "stack the
deck"—as another mom puts it—in her kids' favor.
Intelligence wasn't the only, or even the primary, reason many parents chose
the repository. As the demographics link noted, most of the Slate parents work in health care.
This occupational tilt is no accident. Many of the health-industry
parents preferred the repository to other sperm banks because it screened
candidates carefully for genetic and other illnesses. "Other places used
med students' sperm, and I knew a lot of unstable and unhappy doctors, and I
didn't want that," says "Carmen," a psychologist. "I see
health problems all the time in 3-D. I didn't want to plague a kid with
that," says Liza.
The Seed parents rave about their offspring. They seem to have elevated
expectations for their kids, but not stratospheric ones. Most deny they
pressure their children. (True? Who knows?) Several moms insist they actively
de-emphasize the importance of smarts. "I am trying very hard not to let
my son … see his own intelligence as a ticket to personal success. …
Intelligence is a tool. It doesn't make someone better than anyone else,"
writes "Ruby." Carmen says she doesn't want to raise geniuses, but
"Renaissance kids," who enjoy school, but also sports and music and
friendship and anything else. One says she picked an Olympic athlete as her
donor because she didn't want to fixate on IQ. Another says she chose the
"happiest" donor she could find. Still, when pressed, the parents
tend to admit that they expect a little bit more of their boosted baby than
they would have otherwise.
Most of the parents believe in genes, but they are not rabid genetic
determinists. Most say there's a 50-50 balance between nature and nurture, with
only a few tipping 60 percent to nature. And now that they've got thriving
kids, they don't worry about it. "I can't tell where genes stop and
environment begins," wrote one mom, "and I don't care."
In fact, you can't separate nature and nurture in studying these kids, because
they all get so much excellent nurture. Their parents are extremely motivated.
The parents chose the repository because they were dead serious about
parenting, and they have followed through with extreme energy. Most of the Slate mothers didn't have kids till
their late 30s, and they burn with the zeal typical of late mothers. Almost all
are ultra-involved. They coach basketball teams. They practice music with their
kids. They read child-care manuals by the boxload. They homeschool or send the
tots to the best private schools they can find. When her first child was an
infant, Liza organized a Better Baby salon with her friends—a group that
studied how to raise "morally intelligent children." Are the kids
successful because they have hot-wired genes or because they have jazzed-up
parents? It's unanswerable.
The other defining quality of these repository families is that they are hugely
matriarchal. All of the mothers I spoke to went to the repository because they
wanted to. The husbands were reluctant or ambivalent. (Several had grown-up
kids already and didn't want more.) "He had nothing to do with it,"
says "Joan," a California mother. The mothers seem ferociously close
to their children but, with a couple of exceptions, the "social"
fathers seem distant. In the divorced families, the mothers have assumed
essentially all parenting responsibility. Three divorcees uttered almost exactly
the same sentence to me: "My husband is not emotionally involved with the
children." Even in most of the intact families, the mother dominates the
relationship with the child. Ruby notes that her son has always called his
father by his first name, never "Dad."
The mothers ignore—perhaps intentionally—a painful question: Is it the lack of
genetic connection that chills the father-kid relationships? You can see why
the mothers don't want to address this: If genetic distance causes the chill,
then the mothers might feel responsible, because they chose the sperm bank. The
moms tend to attribute the fathers' distance to temperament, to their inherent
emotional unavailability.
But I suspect sociobiology matters enormously here. The mother has a genetic
connection to her child. The father has none. The father also knows that his
wife chose a man who is supposed to be smarter, healthier, and more physically
gifted than him to father their child. It's easy to see how that could squash
his paternal self-esteem and alienate him from his kids. And the artifice of
pretending a child is your own flesh and blood must be wearing. (The alienation
is surely magnified by the fact that the people who used the repository do
believe genes matter. If the fathers were skeptics about genetic determinism,
they might welcome any child with love. But if they believe in genes, they may
feel no closer to their own sperm-bank children than to any random kid on the
street.)
This is why I was not surprised that fathers did not call me. (The one father
who did e-mail me is, fortunately, a very happy exception: A more loving and
enthusiastic dad you couldn't find.)
The family dynamics can grow even more complex when kids learn their fathers
are not their genetic fathers. Most of the Slate parents have informed their kids about their
origins. Only two parents have not. This is a sure sign that the Slate group is not a representative
sample, because according to studies, the vast majority of sperm-bank parents
do not tell their kids.
The parents told for various reasons. Many believe it's wrong to keep a big
secret, figuring that the secret will fester and emerge later in a more
poisonous way. (Psychologists increasingly recommend telling sperm-bank kids
for this reason. If the secret will come out some day anyway—and it usually
does after a parent dies—then it's better to reveal it gently and carefully
than let it break during a family fight.) One mother is planning to tell her
kids because her husband has threatened to mention it in divorce proceedings.
Several moms say they told because they wanted to encourage their kids not to
be like their fathers. One mother, for example, revealed her son's origin to
him two weeks ago, after he told her he wanted to attend professional wrestling
school instead of college. "I told him so that he would know that he is
better than that, that his genes are better than his father's," says
"Sarah."
(This case is especially awkward for another reason. Sarah, like another mom I
talked to, told her son he is Nobel sperm-bank offspring, but did not tell the
father that the son knows. In other words, the son knows his father is not his
genetic father, but the father doesn't know that his son knows.)
Still, all the parents who have spilled the beans say they're glad they did it.
It lifted a weight off them. Their kids were generally not surprised, they
report: Some kids told their moms that they always felt something was off.
"It took [my son] about five seconds to say, 'I'm relieved,' " says
Joan. The devoted father says telling hasn't affected his relationship with his
11-year-old at all: "He's still immensely in love with his daddy."
Several parents contacted me because they wanted to proselytize. They are
delighted with their children. They believe the genius sperm bank was a
wonderful idea that deserves a revival.
But other mothers have a more personal, and moving, reason for getting in
touch. Mostly they are single mothers who have recently told their kids about
their origins. They find themselves with children who no longer know exactly
who they are and no longer have a complete family. The mothers don't have much
to tell them. When the repository mailed them letters in 1999 announcing it was
closing, the mothers felt alarmed: They were losing their last connection to their
children's history. Now they seek to help their children learn their identities
and maybe find new relatives. Several of these mothers have also lost their own
parents recently. They find themselves more alone in the world than they
expected to be. "I don't think I would have talked to you if my ex-husband
was still around," says one.
These mothers, such as the one searching for Donor
White, are eager to establish some kind of bond between their
children and their donor fathers. Some mothers with a single child hope to find
genetic siblings, perhaps to build a new kind of family. And one divorced
mother says she dreams about meeting her donor, maybe falling in love, and
having him become, at long last, the father to his own children: "Wouldn't
that be a story and a half?"
sidebar
Most of the nine families live in California, the repository's home state. One
is in the East, another in the Midwest. All the families are middle or
upper-middle class, though a few parents were working class when they went to
the repository. There is a strange occupational skew. Of the eight parents who
told me their profession, six work in health or counseling. The other two work
in academia and insurance.
Do they seem smart? Yes, generally. A couple are quite brilliant, and almost
all are very quick and cogent. Most also seem socially well adjusted.
In all but one case, I communicated only with the mother. (I'll discuss why
dads didn't call—and also why there is such an occupational bias—later in the
piece.) Most of the nine parents agreed to in-person or telephone interviews,
but two corresponded with me only by e-mail. Except for two mothers I tracked
down through public records—Afton Blake and another—all the parents contacted
me.
sidebar
Paul Smith, the repository's first director, notes that half the repository's
clients were doctors or nurses.
The Rise of the Smart
Sperm Shopper
How
the Repository for Germinal Choice accidentally revolutionized sperm banking.
By David Plotz
Posted Friday, April 20, 2001, at 5:30 PM PT
By most of the standards Robert Graham set for his Repository for Germinal
Choice, it failed. Graham's sperm bank did produce more than 200 children—much
to their parents' delight—but Graham's grander ambitions crashed. He hoped the
sperm bank would restore credibility to eugenics and galvanize Americans into
saving their degrading gene pool. Instead, the press mocked and derided the
bank as arrogant folly. He thought he would recruit many Nobel Prize winners to
supply him with sperm, but most Nobelists laughed at him, and not a single baby
was born to a Nobel father. Graham wanted the repository to be the prototype
for hundreds of such genius sperm banks across the country. But today there is
only one tiny "high-achiever" sperm bank, and it's struggling. (Click
here to read about it and its founder, Paul
Smith.) Graham intended to conduct a long-term scientific survey on the
repository offspring, proving that these kids were indeed
"superbabies." But parents refused to cooperate, and his study
flopped.
Graham had one great success, but it was something he never intended. He helped
revolutionize the sperm-bank business. Graham, an ultraconservative,
inadvertently became a progressive sperm-bank reformer. Though he believed that
elites should control the sorry masses, he somehow emerged as a great
democratizer. He was an accidental father of consumer reproductive choice.
To appreciate how Graham improved the sperm donation business, you need to
understand how horrible it used to be. The first reported case of donor
insemination occurred in 1884, though it was considered so shocking that it
wasn't reported publicly until 1909. Dr. William Pancoast, a professor at
Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, found that a woman in his care
couldn't get pregnant because of her husband's infertility. At the urging of
some of his medical students and with the permission of the husband—but not the
wife—Pancoast anesthetized her and impregnated her with semen taken from the
"best-looking" student in the class. She never was told what was done
to her or that her husband was not her child's father. This kind of subterfuge,
made-up-on-the-spot, loosey-goosey standards and reliance on overwilling
medical students would become the dismal defining qualities of donor
insemination (DI) practice.
Such DI with fresh semen was practiced, though uncommonly, during the first half
of the 20th century. After World War II, DI became more common,
though no less secretive. Doctors supplied patients—always married women with
infertile husbands—with fresh sperm gleaned from medical students, residents, and
colleagues. (Many a doctor over 50 funded his medical-school socializing with
sperm donation.) The process was haphazard, at best: The donors supplied only
brief medical history and weren't tested for disease. Doctors ruled patients
utterly. Women were given little or no choice about their donors. Anonymity was
absolute: In most cases, no records were kept. (Some doctors didn't even bother
finding a donor: They just used their own semen.)
The furtiveness was understandable. Through the '50s and into the '60s, most
states held that DI children were bastards and that impregnated women had
committed adultery. In 1954, for example, Cook County in Illinois declared DI
"contrary to public policy and good morals." The pope condemned DI as
a sin.
The law turned in favor of sperm donation during the '60s. A 1968 California
Supreme Court decision confirmed that the social father of a DI child indeed
assumed all paternal rights. The 1973 Uniform Parentage Act, adopted by every
state, established this principle nationwide.
At the same time, sperm banking emerged as an alternative to insemination with
fresh sperm. New freezing techniques allowed semen to be stored for months in
liquid nitrogen "cryobanks." Sperm banking remained a small business,
though. When Robert Graham decided to open his cryo-repository in the late
'70s, he found very few competitors, notably the California Cryobank in Los
Angeles.
Dr. Cappy Rothman, co-founder of the California Cryobank and a pioneer in male
infertility research, knew Graham and viewed his Nobel sperm bank as a blight
on the profession. "When he brought in William Shockley as a donor, that
was the worst blow for sperm banking," says Rothman. "And his
eugenics, his perception of where the human race should go, they were terrible."
Yet Graham's repository catalyzed the field. Even Dr. Charles Sims, the other
co-founder of the California Cryobank, conceded in a 1983 interview that the
repository "changed the face of sperm banking forever."
Graham brought rigor to an often-casual trade. Since Graham intended to supply
women only with la crème de la crème,
as it were, of sperm, he demanded stringent testing and examination. His donors
endured physicals and endless blood tests. They completed massive medical
family histories. Any serious illness disqualified them.
And though Graham certainly had an authoritarian streak, he ended up being a
pioneer of consumer choice. Other sperm banks told clients no more about donors
than their eye color, hair color, and blood type. Graham offered a catalog
filled with minibiographies: He detailed professions, athletic skills,
personality, musical gifts. Graham's customers, not their doctors, chose their
own perfect match, based on criteria that mattered to them. Graham also gave
his clients charge over their own insemination. Other sperm banks delivered
their product only to physicians, who would administer it. Graham's patients
could order sperm directly and inseminate themselves at home. "I had tried
with a doctor and it had turned me off to the whole thing. So it was very
important that my husband and I could do it ourselves. It made it a very
mystical experience," says Adrienne Ramm, the mother of three repository
kids.
Essentially by accident, Graham seized control of DI from doctors and handed it
to clients. Other sperm banks, which had also begun to tune into client
desires, followed his lead. This consumer revolution was accelerated by the
advent of AIDS in the early '80s. AIDS killed the market for fresh semen, as
women demanded sperm from HIV-free men. Sperm banks began screening donors for
HIV, freezing their sperm for six months, screening the donors again, and only
then using the samples.
Cryobanks became ever more sensitive to consumer anxiety about health and donor
achievement. Today the California Cryobank—probably the world's premier sperm
bank—tests for a dozen genetic disorders and for almost as many infectious
diseases. Donors must complete a 38-page, three-generation medical history, and
submit to months of blood testing. The cryobank accepts only college graduates
or students enrolled in a four-year program. (The cryobank's offices are in
Westwood, Palo Alto, and Cambridge, Mass., meaning that most of its donors hail
from USC, UCLA, Stanford, Harvard, and MIT.) And donors must stand at least 5
feet 9 inches tall. By the time it weeds out the sickly, the short, and the
dim, the California Cryobank accepts only 3 percent to 5 percent of applicants.
The cryobank barrages customers with choices. A recent catalog listed more than
170 men of every race, national origin, and appearance. A client can buy the
entire long medical history (written in the donor's own hand, so the client can
judge handwriting). Some donors make audiotapes that clients listen to.
Rothman insists there is a difference between his standards and Graham's.
Graham, he says, was telling women they must choose geniuses. He says he is
simply responding to market demand. The California Cryobank supplies tall
collegians because that is what women want. (The ideal donor, he says: 6 feet
tall, college degree, brown eyes, blond hair, and dimples.) "If our
customers wanted high-school dropouts, we would give them high-school
dropouts," Rothman has said.
This attention to consumer choice has boosted the sperm-bank industry. Banks
now cater eagerly to the lesbians and single women who were rejected by
old-school doctors (and by Graham). Rothman estimates that 40 percent of his
clients are single women or lesbians. In 1987, the last year for which there is
data (why no data? Keep reading), more than 30,000 babies were born to women
who used anonymous donors. The number has almost certainly soared since then,
as sperm banks have massively proliferated.
The consumer revolution in sperm banking has a dark side. It commodifies pregnancy.
Sperm is now treated as a product, and customers (not "patients")
demand the same quality assurances that they would for a toaster. This drains
some of the mystery out of getting pregnant and also introduces a dangerous
element of expectation. If sperm is like a toaster, then customers may expect
their money back or a trade-in if a baby doesn't live up to billing. Banks have
been sued by parents of kids who suffer from debilitating illnesses.
The other ugliness about consumer-oriented sperm banking—and consumer-oriented
reproductive science in general—is that it is a "cowboy industry," as
Alexander Capron, University Professor of Law and Medicine at USC, puts it.
Virtually no rules govern sperm banking. The Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly
planned and then failed to issue sperm-bank regs. Individual states regulate
but very halfheartedly. "In most places, there is nothing to prevent you
from setting up Robert Graham's Sperm Bank and Delicatessen," says Capron.
(Indeed, Robert Graham had no medical training at all, yet ran a sperm bank for
two decades. Reproductive medicine is constantly being embarrassed by
unregulated charlatans: What other branch of medicine could harbor a doctor
like Cecil Jacobson, the fertility specialist who impregnated more than 70
women with his own semen while promising them anonymous donors?)
The chaos of sperm banking means it answers largely to the whims of desperate
customers and not to high medical or ethical standards. Fewer than a dozen of
the several hundred sperm banks in the United States have bothered to meet the
accreditation standards of the American Association of Tissue Banks. (The
California Cryobank is accredited.) There are no standard policies about how
many kids a donor may father, what tests should be performed on donors or their
semen, or what records—if any—should be kept so that donors are not utterly
lost. Some sperm banks keep elaborate records. Some seem to keep none. No sperm
bank trade association exists, so no one even knows how many banks there are.
And no one has the faintest idea how many sperm bank kids are born every year.
The only reason the 1987 figure of 30,000 exists is that the federal government
performed a onetime census as part of an effort to push the industry into
behaving itself. Click here to read an interesting theory about why
politics has made sperm banking so disorderly.
The anarchy is particularly alarming around the issue of donor identification.
In the old days, DI families hid their "shame" from the children,
relatives, family members. But today's smart sperm shoppers have a different
view. More and more DI parents are telling their kids of their origins (this is
because more DI parents are single or lesbians, hence paternal anxiety is not a
question.) Thanks in part to Graham, DI parents no longer see themselves as
embarrassed beneficiaries of some doctor's largesse. They view themselves as
customers, and they believe they have a right to know everything about the
product they bought. The adoption-rights movement, which has cracked open
long-sealed adoption records, is emboldening sperm bank parents and their kids.
A similar rebellion is brewing among them to open the sperm files and pierce
the curtain of anonymity.
Sweden and New Zealand, among other countries, have established national donor
registries that allow kids to learn about their biological fathers. A Canadian
group is pushing for a donor registry up north. The Web (as well as my e-mail
inbox) is overflowing with sperm-bank kids—many from the bad old days of med
student donations—searching for donor dads. Sperm banks are responding to the
pressure: Several American banks now have openness options, in which children can
contact their donor when they reach age 18.
But children from the Repository for Germinal Choice have no such redress.
Though Graham became an unlikely advocate for consumer rights, he did not
provision for his customers in death. His will left no money to continue the
repository and no instructions on preserving its records. Since the bank closed
in 1999, the records seem to have vanished. No one I have talked to even knows
where they are. Parents and donors certainly have no access to them. And though
some donors and parents want to find each other, Graham's widow and the
repository's former staff won't make any effort to help them. That is why so
many searching parents and donors have contacted Slate. The repository can't help them with this last,
important consumer request, but perhaps the Web can.
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
USC's Capron attributes the Wild-Westness of sperm banking to the touchiness of
reproductive politics. Liberals, who normally favor medical regulation, are
libertarian about reproductive choice. They believe any regulation will limit
reproductive freedom. Conservatives don't want to rein in these independent
businesses. Also sperm banks exist in a netherworld between medicine and
commerce. Because of this political sensitivity and the fish-nor-fowl quality
of sperm banks, they have managed to duck the rigorous standards, ethical
guidelines, and government supervision that cover every other important area of
medicine. It is ruled by rabid customers who will do or pay almost anything to
have a baby.
The "Genius Babies" Grow Up
What
happened to 15 children from the Nobel Prize sperm bank?
By David Plotz
Posted Wednesday, May 30, 2001, at 12:00 AM PT
Two months ago, a 16-year-old Midwestern boy—let's call him
"Jon"—discovered he is not who he thought he was. Jon's mom,
"Sarah," informed him that his father was not his biological father
and that he was conceived using "genius sperm" from the Repository
for Germinal Choice. Jon had been telling his mom that, while he would definitely
attend college, he also wanted to enroll in professional wrestling school. She
decided he needed to know "he had more potential than that."
Jon wasn't shocked to learn of his Nobel sperm bank origins. Sarah had been
intimating for years that Jon shouldn't take his father—a difficult man who's
had trouble holding jobs—as a role model. "She had been dropping hints
since I was in the sixth grade. She told me I had the potential to do better
than him. Once, a few years ago, she said something about how I didn't have to
worry about Dad's genes—which is good because he's not the most savory
character."
(This family home is surely peculiar at the moment. Jon's father, who isn't
around much, doesn't know that Jon has discovered his origins. Jon's younger
sister has no inkling that her brother is Nobel sperm bank kid—and that she is,
too.)
The idea that he was specially conceived through the repository has galvanized
Jon. He scoured the Web for information about the repository and e-mailed Slate to see what we knew. He has
researched the repository's history, concluding that founder Robert Graham, who
died in 1997, "was pretty much a Nazi," but that the results of his
sperm bank—such as himself—weren't so bad.
Is Jon what Graham dreamed of when he built his genius sperm bank? Jon doesn't
adore school, but he's still going to graduate a year early. He's "pretty
good at math" but not at science. He favors history and English. He likes
music, which in his case means rap. (He's writing lyrics for a group that he
started with some friends.) He says learning about his genetic head-start has
made him concentrate a bit more on school work. "Before I thought I didn't
have the potential. Now I think I have got the potential and that I'm just
lazy," he says, half-joking.
Jon, in short, is a very typical American teen-ager. His life is slightly more
unsettled and his origins are slightly more scenic, but he is not some bizarre
Überkid. He is a bright boy, a fine, funny talker, an energetic correspondent.
Will he succeed at what he tries? I expect so. Will he be a leader of renown or
an inventor of genius or a Nobel Prize-winner? I doubt it, but who knows?—he's
only 16.
Jon's biography is echoed in the other repository kids Slate located. They show very much
promise, but they are very much children. I have interviewed nine families with
15 children conceived through the repository. (I have also corresponded some
with three other families that have four kids and e-mailed cursorily with
another child.) These 15—or, counting the brief contacts, 20—kids are a
fraction of the entire repository crop of 219 kids. (How did I find them?)
The Slate 15 range in
age from 6 to 19, with most falling between 10 and 16. The group consists of
eight boys and seven girls. The 15 represent eight different donors, but there
is a bizarre bias toward one donor. Seven of the 15 come from Donor Fuchsia. (Click here to read more about this donor and why
he might be so popular. The seven Fuchsia kids come from three different
families: They don't know each other, but I would be happy to introduce them.)
I know less than I would like to about these children. I have communicated
directly with only three of them, all teen-age boys. Parents have provided
detailed information to me about the other dozen, but their second-hand—and
admittedly biased—accounts lack the vividness of a real interview. Still, it's
hard to fault the moms and dads for their reluctance to bare their children to
the world. Many of the parents told me they're horrified by the very public
life of Doron Blake, the Nobel sperm bank's most famous kid. They recoil at the
idea of similarly exposing their darlings. (Click here
to read a profile of Doron, one of the three kids I did interview.)
A final, obvious caveat: This is not a representative sample. These families
volunteered to speak. I have no idea how the Slate 15 compare to the entire repository group. I also
have no way to test these kids for mental acuity or IQ or anything else. What I
gathered is anecdote, not data.
So have the "superbabies" grown into superkids? The Slate 15 seem to be an accomplished
bunch. Half a dozen parents credit their kids with 4.0 GPAs. Five parents told
me that their kids tested at the top of their school and that their school was
the best in the area. Are they prodigies? That's harder to know. Doron Blake
was touted as a prodigy as a kid: He has grown up to be a very smart but not
supernatural college student. The two teen-age girls in the Ramm family—the
only other family besides the Blakes that is public—are artistically
precocious: one an outstanding singer, the other an outstanding dancer. A
14-year-old out West, "Sam," is touted by his parents as a
math-science genius with "Olympic" potential in skiing. A 14-year-old
in California, "Gage," is trading stocks and researching
international business at a precocious age. Another teen-ager in California,
"Jacob," is a musical whiz who is already studying quantum theory.
There's a curious difference between how parents describe sons and daughters.
The Slate 15 includes a
cluster of five girls between 10 and 13. Their parents give them a very
different kind of rave review than the boys' parents do. The girls' parents
marvel that their daughters are wonderful yet normal. All are socially
well-adjusted, athletic, and enthusiastic, and all are excellent students. They
are, as one mom puts it about her daughters, "Renaissance kids."
The overall parental enthusiasm should surprise no one. The parents happiest
with the repository are the parents most likely to talk to a reporter and most
likely to have high-achieving kids.
Do the children resemble their genetic fathers? Three offspring of Olympic gold
medalist Donor Fuchsia are reportedly amazing athletes. Gage shares a love of
economics with his donor. Several of the science/math enthusiasts were fathered
by science/math professors. Three moms who explicitly chose "happy"
donors report that their kids have sunny personalities.
All the Slate 15 are in
good health, except one. The Ramm's 9-year-old son Logan—a "most happy,
wonderful boy," says his mother Adrienne—has a developmental disability.
He acquired it, Adrienne says, after a vaccination in infancy. He does not
speak but communicates using a talking computer. Adrienne told me she and her
husband hope to learn more about Donor Fuchsia—Logan's biological father—so
that they might find clues about Logan's disability. They also want to discover
what kind of athlete Fuchsia was, so they can know what sports Logan might
excel at.
The Slate 15 aren't
placid angels. Doron Blake has been bucking at his mom and resents the genetic
expectations placed on him. Gage has rebelled against his very liberal parents.
"He feels so powerful, with his intelligence, that sometimes it's as
though he's the parent, and my husband and I are the kids. He will NOT be
controlled by either of us," writes Gage's mom. (She notes that one of
Gage's rebellions has been trying to stop her from smoking marijuana.)
Readers have asked me whether it's nature or nurture that has made the
repository kids what they are. The question cannot be answered, even if I could
conduct elaborate psychometric surveys on the Slate 15. The repository kids all have hyperinvolved
parents. Their moms are constantly enrolling them for music lessons and sports
teams. The parents don't seem to be bullies—several explicitly don't push their
kids intellectually—but they are incredibly attentive and supportive. As one
mom e-mailed, "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." Is it their genes or their devoted parents that kick-started
them? Probably both.
A dozen of the 15 know they come from the Nobel Prize sperm bank. That makes
them unusual: Studies show the vast majority of parents who use sperm banks
don't tell their kids. The kids seem unbothered, even blasé, about their
origins. Gage says he wasn't very surprised when his mom broke the news:
"I have always noticed differences between my dad and me. … His
personality is nothing like mine." Many mothers said their kids felt
"relief" when they learned dad was not dad. As Jacob's mom put it, "He
always knew but he didn't know."
The kids certainly don't credit their genesis with changing them. Most of them
were eager students before they knew, and learning about the bank hasn't
altered that. Gage, who writes more like a 40-year-old than a 14-year-old,
e-mailed me that "the thought that I was genetically engineered to be
intelligent might have provided further impetus to my drive to improve my
grades, but I do not believe it was the main factor." And the kids don't
feel that parents pushed them extra-hard because they are Nobel sperm bank
babies. Genetic expectations, it seems, are not so burdensome. (Nor do the kids
seem very curious about their genetic fathers and siblings. Click here for why they seem indifferent.)
Many reader correspondents have been prodding me for a final verdict about the
repository. I hope it's clear how hopeless it would be to issue a sweeping
conclusion based on the Slate
15. My sample is mingy. I have no test scores or personality exams or report
cards. Nature and nurture are all tangled up. Statistical judgment is
impossible.
But the repository can be measured against its own ambitions. Over the years,
Robert Graham announced three goals for his project. At first, he envisioned
the repository as a scientific experiment to prove that genes control
intelligence. By that standard, the repository flopped. You can't conduct a
controlled scientific study about nature and nurture with a self-selecting
group of high-achieving families. Did the superstar sperm give the Slate 15 (or the Graham 219) an
intelligence boost? Perhaps, but I don't know, and no one else does either.
Graham's second ambition was that his kids would form a cadre of leaders and
elite scientists. Here, Slate
arrives too soon. The 219 repository kids may grow up to be the essential men
and women of the land. They may not. Many have made a stellar start, but they
haven't arrived yet. Graham's question goes unanswered.
As Graham aged and mellowed, he settled on a more modest aim. Eventually he
viewed the repository as altruism. It would give parents who couldn't have
children themselves a chance to have a child that might be healthier, might be
smarter, might be more musical. In this Graham is vindicated. The lasting
accomplishment of the repository, I suspect (and the Slate 15 suggests), will not be that
it has filled the world with genius children, but that it has filled homes with
beloved ones.
sidebar
Most of the families saw the introduction to the Seed project and contacted me.
None of them had ever spoken to a reporter before. I also independently reached
the two public repository families, the Blakes and the Ramms. I described my
interview with Doron Blake in this Seed installment.
I recently interviewed Adrienne Ramm, mother of two teen-age girls and a
preteen boy.
sidebar
Fuchsia does not fit the stereotype of the Nobel sperm bank: He is not a scientist.
His donor biography—which you can read here—describes him as "one of the most
accomplished athletes in the world." Robert Graham revealed elsewhere that
Fuchsia won an Olympic gold medal. Parents say they chose Fuchsia because they
didn't want a nerdy donor. They relished the idea of a donor who was both smart
and athletic.
sidebar
Jon hopes to learn something about his donor dad but isn't eager to meet him. "I
think it would be awkward. All I could say would be 'How dare you!' or 'Good
job!' " Doron and Gage, too, are uninterested in meeting donor fathers or
siblings. "Beth," whose search for Donor White was chronicled in this
Seed article, says her daughter "Joy"
hopes to meet her donor father and that she imagines he's "like
Dumbledore, the good wizard in the Harry Potter books." But Beth is keener
on the search mission than Joy. In general, parents are much more enthused to
locate genetic family members than the kids are. That may change as the
repository children become older and more curious about where they come from.
Donor White Meets His
Daughter
Fifteen
months ago, Slate helped a mother
search for the Nobel Prize sperm bank's "Donor White"—the genetic
father of her daughter. We just found him.
By David Plotz
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2002, at 12:23 PM PT
In February 2001, Slate
launched "Seed," a three-month series about the Repository for
Germinal Choice, the "Nobel Prize" sperm bank that was started by
California industrialist Robert Graham in 1980 and closed in 1999. Slate searched for the 200-odd
children conceived through the "genius sperm bank," their parents,
and the men who donated the sperm for them. (At the bottom of the page, you'll
find links to the 13 other articles in the Seed series, including the introduction
explaining the project.)
The article that generated by far the most reader response chronicled the hunt
for Donor White. The piece, which you can read here,
recounted the story of "Beth" and her now 11-year-old daughter,
"Joy." Beth, whose husband had had a vasectomy, conceived Joy using
sperm from the repository donor identified as "White # 6." According
to the description in the repository catalog, Donor
White was an accomplished scientist born in the 1930s who liked running and
gardening. Employees at the repository told Beth that other mothers who used
Donor White had "happy babies." That's what Beth got: a happy, blond
infant, who has grown up into a happy, blond, ballet-dancing, Harry
Potter-loving, horseback-riding little girl.
Beth wanted to thank the man who gave her this gift, so when Joy was 7 months
old, Beth arranged to leave the baby at the repository's Escondido, Calif.,
office for a few hours. Beth, who then lived nearby, dropped Joy off with the
office manager, Dora Vaux. Vaux immediately called Donor White, who also lived
in Southern California. The donor and his wife rushed over to meet his baby
daughter. They brought Joy a Fisher-Price doll. When the visit ended, he told
Vaux he "would live on that moment for the rest of his life."
As Joy grew up, Beth sent photographs of her to the repository, always
enclosing an extra copy for Donor White. In 1995, Donor White responded by
writing Joy a birthday card, in care of the repository. The repository covered
up his signature but forwarded the card to Beth. Soon Beth and Donor White were
corresponding regularly through the repository. (Beth, understandably, didn't
tell 5-year-old Joy about it.) Beth sent the donor a Father's Day card. He
mailed back a poem he wrote about Joy, "A Figure of Red on a Field of
White." He said that he hoped Joy would follow him into science since he
and his wife had no children of their own. He and his wife signed their letters
"your adoptive grandparents." In one Christmastime note, he told Beth
that he hoped he might someday, somehow meet his daughter.
Then, in early 1997, the letters stopped. Dora Vaux had left the sperm bank. A
new manager and the board of directors worried that the correspondence violated
the repository's confidentiality rules. The repository wrote a note to Beth:
"We simply cannot continue to share Joy with the donor."
Beth was devastated. She and Joy were alone in the world. She had divorced from
Joy's "social" father, and she had no other children. In 2000, when
Joy was 9, Beth finally told her about her genetic father. She read Joy one of
Donor White's letters and gave her the Fisher-Price doll she had kept for all
those years. Joy told Beth that she thought of Donor White "as being like
Professor Dumbledore in the Harry Potter books." Joy said she wanted to
meet him.
When Beth saw Seed, she called Slate.
She knew that Donor White wanted to find her as much as she wanted to find him,
and she thought Slate's
articles—and our offer to be a conduit—were her only chance. "A Mother
Searches for 'Donor White' " appeared on Feb. 27, 2001, inviting Donor
White to contact me confidentially. Beth and I got our hopes up. Scores of
readers wrote to sympathize with Beth and Joy. Dozens of offspring from other
sperm banks e-mailed me to ask Slate
to find their donor fathers. But not a word came from Donor White.
Three TV newsmagazines contacted Slate
wanting to interview Beth and Joy. Beth, protective of her family's privacy and
Joy's innocence, agonized about the offers and eventually refused. Beth and I
kept corresponding. "I can't believe that he knows about us and is
choosing not to contact Joy. You will see from the letter how warm and
unguarded he was," she wrote. "I can imagine him, a 70-year-old man,
with no children to call his own, looking at these pictures of Joy and just
being overcome with all kinds of emotions. I wish he could see them."
Then, on June 12, 2002, a long e-mail appeared in my inbox. It began,
"This is Donor White …"
Donor White, it seems, isn't much of an Internet user, and he had never heard
of Slate. But on June
11, he had used a search engine for the first time. He typed "genius sperm
bank" into alltheweb.com. It pulled up "A Mother Searches for 'Donor
White.' " He was stunned.
In his initial e-mail, which you can read here, Donor White offered details to verify his
identity. He described how he had been recruited into the repository in 1984,
when he was working in a California high-tech company. He gave a careful
account of the visit he had with Joy in 1991. He mentioned that he'd fathered
11 boys and eight girls through the repository. He described how Dora Vaux
inadvertently let him learn the identities of two other children—a brother and
sister—and that for years he ran by their house so he could watch them grow up.
He ended the note like this:
"I cannot imagine that some of the donors contacted have said that they
rarely think about their children, because I think of mine very often. Indeed,
I expect that they will be included among my last conscious thoughts on this
sweet earth."
Donor White asked me to forward the e-mail to Beth, but before I would, I
needed to verify his identity. Every corroborating fact he gave about the
repository could have been gathered from press reports. So I quizzed him about
details of his family history that he revealed in his earlier letters to Beth,
letters that she had passed on to me. (I asked him where his ancestors were
from, how old his mother was, how one of his grandfathers died, and what Beth's
and Joy's real first names were.) He nailed the answers.
So who is Donor White—no, not his name—and why was he involved in the
"Nobel Prize" sperm bank? Read about him here.
The night I got Donor White's answers, I called Beth and forwarded his first
e-mail to her. I included Donor White's e-mail address so she could write him
directly. Beth was ecstatic and wrote back instantly. Donor White received her
e-mail on Father's Day. They immediately struck up a giddy, loving
correspondence. He traced his family tree for Beth, described his mother and
father, told family stories, and sent a poem that his mother had written. Donor
White charmed Beth with his straightforward warmth. "I am so emotional I
am having a hard time concentrating," she wrote me in a late June e-mail.
Beth kept the news from Joy for three weeks. "I needed time to settle
down, I was on an emotional high. … I just wanted to tell her in the best way
possible." When Beth told Joy that she'd found Donor White, her daughter
asked, "When can I meet him!!?"
On July Fourth, Joy wrote her first e-mail to Donor White. Since then, Joy and
Donor White have been messaging each other two or three times a week. She
writes to him about school, dance, track, her summer vacation. Joy advised him
to see the Harry Potter movie
before reading the book. Donor White talked about his pets and favorite books
and passed on stories about their ancestors. Joy asked what she should call Donor
White and his wife, and they decided to use first names. They sent each other
photographs. Writes Donor White, "I was most highly pleased with Joy, and
my photo was not so bad that it caused her to change her mind about a visit
with us."
At the end of August, Beth and Joy will travel to California to spend a few
days with Donor White and his wife. He is going to take them to a favorite
garden, for a walk on the beach, and to see a museum that might interest Joy.
"Mostly, though, I think that we will visit in our home, as I have a good
many things to show Joy that I believe will be of interest to her, including
photographs of several of her half-siblings."
And so there is a happy ending, or, rather, a happy beginning.
It is a beginning that could foreshadow many more. Approximately 30,000
children per year are born from anonymous sperm donations—probably half a
million kids in the two decades the practice has flourished. But when Donor
White and Joy see each other in a few weeks, it will be one of the first times
in history that an anonymous sperm donor has met his child—and the only time a
donor and child have met without the help of the sperm bank. (There has been
one published case of a bank helping a child meet her donor. But sperm bank experts I
contacted have not heard about any other encounters between a child and an
anonymous donor. Some American sperm banks are experimenting with
"identity-release" programs that will allow kids to meet donors after
they turn 18. Read about them here.)
Was it wrong for Slate to
break the confidentiality the repository required? Read a discussion about this.
America appears on the cusp of a revolution in the relationship between donors
and offspring. In the last few decades, the United States has been astonished by
the vigorous campaign of adoptees to break open adoption records. A similar
movement among sperm bank children seems inevitable. This is an age of genetic
determinism. People increasingly demand to know their genetic heritage. Sperm
bank kids are missing half of their genetic history, and they want to know it.
A California court recently ordered a sperm bank to reveal the identity of a
donor to his offspring when it turned out the donor had failed to mention a
rare gene-linked illness in his medical history.
The wall of secrecy around sperm banks is cracking. In the past, families
always hid their use of donor sperm in order to protect fathers. But more and
more sperm bank customers are single women and lesbians, who don't need to
pretend.
The result of these changes: Sperm bank kids will soon be demanding names. The
first large cohort of sperm bank kids is now in its late teens. Unlike donor
offspring of the '50s and '60s, many of them know their parents used a bank. As
they enter adulthood and start their own families—which is the time people get
curious about their past—they may start insisting that sperm banks open their
sealed records. (Seed suggests that the Web could be another mechanism for
donors and children to find each other. The Single Mothers by Choice Web site, for example, has a "sibling registry"
where sperm bank moms can look for other kids from their donor.) The sperm bank
kids may not succeed in opening records: The law isn't on their side. But
Americans changed their minds about the rights of adoptees, and adoption
records are easier and easier to open. Will they change their mind again if
thousands of donor offspring demand to know their origins?
What will happen if donors and children do start finding each other? In some
respects, donor offspring are like adoptees: They have a genetic parental
relationship that challenges a social parental relationship. Adoptees and their
birth parents don't necessarily find happiness when they meet, and there's no
reason to assume that donors and their children will have it easy. But unlike
adoptees, donor offspring are unlikely to be troubled by feelings of
abandonment.
Donor White and Joy seem likely to avoid many of the emotional conflicts that
others might face. Donor White is too old to be Joy's father, so their
relationship already resembles a grandparent-grandchild bond more than a
parental one. Joy's social father, while not enthusiastic about the reunion,
isn't trying to prevent it. Donor White has no children of his own, so he
doesn't have to worry about hurting the feelings of his own kids when he pays
attention to Joy. Still, who knows how it will turn out in reality? Slate will keep in touch with Donor
White, Beth, and Joy to discover what happens in their new family.
The original idea of Seed was to see what became of the children born from the
"Nobel Prize" sperm bank. We were happily surprised when it turned
out that people were just as interested in lost families as in genius
babies—and that Slate,
purely by accident, had become a tool for helping donors and repository
families find each other.
This is a task we welcome. I've heard from several other repository donors who
would like to meet their children and from several other repository mothers who
would like to meet their donors or have their children meet unknown siblings. (Slate has introduced two
half-siblings from one donor and plans to introduce several others to each
other in coming weeks.)
Beth and Donor White hope their story will inspire other Donor White families
to seek them out. Beth would like siblings for Joy. Donor White would love to
know more about his other, lost family.
sidebar
Dear Mr. Plotz:
This is Donor White and, even though some 15 months late, I hope that you will
be so kind as to pass on this note and my e-mail address to Beth about whom you
wrote in your article regarding the Repository of Germinal Choice (RGC).
I am sorry to be so late in responding, but some allowances should be made for
lack of knowledge about the type of Internet search engines that finally led me
to your article, considering that I was one of those who went to a college
specializing in engineering in the days when students wore their foot-long
slide rules dangling from their belts and tied to one leg like a gun fighter in
the Old West. Later, when introduced to computers, I carried a foot-long tray
of punched cards into a room about the size of a basketball court, all of which
was required to hold a single computer. Those of my generation can never
compete in cyberspace with younger people who grew up using modern computers.
So that you and Beth might know that I am who I claim to be, please allow me to
tell you a little bit about how I became involved with the RGC. In about 1984,
I received a call from the receptionist at the high-tech company where I worked
telling me that I had two visitors. I assumed that they would be visiting
scientists with whom I often dealt, but instead I found two older women unknown
to me, one of whom was Dora Vaux mentioned in your article.
They received visitors badges and I escorted them to my office, but I soon
excused myself long enough to close the open office door after being told of
recommendations from two different persons saying that I might be a suitable
candidate to be a donor at a sperm bank they represented. I listened, without
saying much, mainly because of being virtually speechless. I would never have
thought about such a thing in my entire lifetime and had no idea that I would
wind up becoming involved. However, not wishing to be rude, I told them that I
would need to think about this myself for some time and then speak to my wife
before getting back to them in case there might be any chance of going forward.
In fact, I had already written this off as a strange experience and had no
intention of any additional discussions. Over fully the next three months,
almost every week, I received a copy of a letter from a grateful recipient, a
copy of a magazine article, or a videotape about the RGC. None of this made
much difference but might have worked subconsciously because then came the
dream that changed everything.
I had also been doing some research on family history and had been thinking
about my grandfather who was only 6 months old when his father left for the
Civil War, never to return. My grandfather lost contact with his father's
family and always regretting not knowing more about them.
The combinations of these things, perhaps, led to a dream in which I was
sitting on the edge of an open field with my back against the trunk of a giant
oak tree. It was a beautiful day and monarch butterflies were flitting about
all around me, when some distance away the outline of a man could be seen
coming out of the field toward me. There was a bright light at his back that
blinded me until he came close enough to fall within the shade of the tree, at
which time I immediately knew who he was before a single word was said. While
no photograph of him existed, I knew that this poorly dressed man was my
great-grandfather from the Civil War, because he looked exactly like a
composite of my father and grandfather.
Without any introduction, he spoke to me as follows: Most of my friends
volunteered at the first opportunity to enter the war. I was newly married and
waited until there was danger of being conscripted before joining up. Because
of that I had a son that I was never really able to know, which is the only
reason that you and all of those known to you having my name ever had a chance
at life. You now have that same opportunity.
I had never had a dream of such clarity, and there is no doubt that this caused
me to agree to an evaluation, which I never expected to lead to anything
because I had been told that even many of those with high sperm counts produced
samples that did not freeze well. Well, there were a few more delays here and
there, but if Joy has a desire to be a part of a large family she would be
highly pleased if all of her half-siblings could be rounded up. At the last
accounting that I had, there were 19, 11 boys and eight girls. I have seen very
pleasing photographs of 11 of these and, in addition to the short visit with
Joy of which mom Beth wrote, I have had the opportunity to watch two of the
children grow into their teenage years.
As for my wonderful visit with Joy, she was being held by Dora when my wife and
I walked up to them, and Joy immediately held out her arms to me to be taken. I
held and admired her for perhaps 30 minutes during which time she was perfectly
happy. Then she began to want to get down on the carpeted floor, where she
quickly scooted over to a stroller that her mom had left and pulled herself up
and began to try to step up over the side and get into the stroller seat. I
lifted her up and sat her into the stroller, which caused the first hint of
unhappiness that we had noticed. I then lifted her out and let her struggle
until she was able to get into the stroller by herself, at 7 months of age.
I then turned to my wife and said to her: "We really have ourselves
something special here." The smart one in my family, by a wide margin, has
been my much younger sister. At a very early age she began to speak, not just
in words but in complete sentences. She was so remarkable that almost every one
who was around her said that she was the smartest child that they had ever
seen. However, she could not tolerate being helped and wanted to do everything
for herself. I could see that exact same behavior in baby Joy, and my guess is
that this never changed. My sister lived up to her early potential, as several
textbooks that she has written are used at colleges all across the country. The
only reason for me to think that I might be even halfway suitable as a donor is
because I had the same potential for inheritance at birth as did my sister.
We are not quite done with my Civil War ancestor yet. Beth has been extremely
kind to show her appreciation in numerous ways, as she has said. After hearing
of the story about my dream from Dora, Beth carried Joy to the re-enactment of
a Civil War battle and found a man fully dressed in a fine soldier's uniform. I
have no idea whether he was found at random or how this came about, but somehow
a photograph came to be made with this Civil War soldier holding Joy (maybe 2
years old) in his lap. I do not exaggerate when I tell you that the hair stood
up on the back of my neck and I felt a tingling all over as I saw how much that
soldier looked like the man in my dream. Say what you will about this being a
coincidence, but to me it was a sign that my great-grandfather would have been
pleased that I had taken his advice given under the shade of that oak tree.
In regard to the two children that I have been able to watch grow up, the
kindly Dora Vaux always gave me a bit more information on the White-6 children
than the RGC management would have liked. She sent me a picture on one occasion
of one of the earlier children, a little boy with his slightly unusual double
given name written on the back. Then, about two years later, she told me the birth
date of his sister. A few days later, by pure chance, I happened to notice a
tiny item in our local newspaper about the announcement from proud parents of a
new baby girl having that same birthday, with an anxiously awaiting brother at
home with the same double name that I knew. There was no doubt in my mind that
these were White-6 children.
I was able to learn from the phone book that their parents lived only about a
mile and a half from my house, and over the years the end of their dead-end
street has been a perfect place for me to turn around while doing my daily
three-mile run. I always make it a point to go by on Christmas morning and on
their birthdays, where the garage door is always decorated with happy birthday
signs and a party is often in progress….
Not yours, but many articles have been written trying to paint Dr. Graham and
my good friend Dora Vaux as villains of some kind, when they had only the best
of intentions in their wish to help others. I attended the funeral of Dr.
Graham and happened to sit next to an elderly gentleman who asked me if I had
known Dr. Graham for long. After telling him that I had not, he told me that he
had known him from the early days. He said that while he did not have to, Dr.
Graham had given him (and several others who had worked with him on developing
his patents for plastic eyeglass lens) a small part of his company and that
this had allowed him to have a comfortable retirement. Despite his great
success in scientific work and in business, it would be my guess that Dr.
Graham would have considered his greatest legacy to have been his establishment
of and work at the RGC.
In some respects, Dr. Graham was his own worst enemy, because he went on
nationwide TV programs in which he knew that there would be an agenda to make
him look bad. This was all done for the good of the work at the RGC. In regard
to the repository, Dr. Graham knew one thing that was very important—any
publicity, bad or good, benefited his work. After such an appearance in which
he might have been asked if he would like to clone Adolph Hitler, or some such
thing, there was a flood of mail from those wishing to be recipients, because
even in the most adversarial of programs there was usually an occasion in which
the camera panned over a wall covered with the most appealing of children.
These pictures of the children trumped anything bad that was said. The
bottleneck in RGC operations was always a shortage of donors, as there were
more recipient applications than could be handled.
I would not wish to end this message before telling Joy how pleased and proud I
was to read of her many accomplishments and activities, but I have known that
this was likely to happen ever since that day when I saw her work so hard to
get into her stroller without any help. I cannot imagine that some of the
donors contacted have said that they rarely think about their children, because
I think of mine very often. Indeed, I expect that they will be included among
my last conscious thoughts on this sweet earth.
My thanks and best regards,
Donor White
sidebar
The description of Donor White No. 6 in the Repository for Germinal Choice's
catalog is spare and clinical. He's described as a "scientist involved in
sophisticated research. Many highly technical publications." His IQ is
"Not tested—but very high." His hobbies are "running, gardening,
reading history." He "excelled in basketball and track." He's
reported to be brown-haired, blue-eyed, medium-complexioned. His blood type is
0+, and he's myopic. One line breaks the chill. Under personality, it reads:
"Very engaging, warm, friendly."
The Repository for Germinal Choice styled itself the "Nobel Prize"
sperm bank. But like all its successful
donors, Donor White hasn't won the Nobel Prize. Now retired from science, he
describes himself as having had a "solid, but not outstanding, career in
technical work, with scores of publications and a good number of patents, some
with military applications." He still doesn't know why repository founder
Robert Graham recruited him. He suspects that a former colleague, who may have
himself been a repository donor, tipped Graham to him, and he guesses Graham
liked that he was both a successful scientist and a decent athlete.
When two repository staffers approached him in 1984, Donor White was
noncommittal. He and his wife couldn't have their own children, but the sperm
bank didn't really interest him. Three months of steady requests didn't change
his mind. Then he had a vivid dream about his great-grandfather, a soldier who
enlisted in the Confederate Army only after his son was born, and then died in
battle. In the dream, his great-grandfather told him that he too had an
opportunity to give others the chance at life.
That inspired Donor White to sign up, and he soon became a stalwart contributor
to the bank. He was older than most donors—around 50 when he started giving—but
age didn't weaken his fertility. He fathered 19 children, more than any other
donor I've heard about. (This large number of offspring raises questions about the repository's practices.)
Donor White soon knew more about his "kids" than he was supposed to.
Most repository donors either had children of their own or chose to not have
them. They tend to be less interested in their bank offspring than Donor White,
who wanted to have his own kids
but couldn't. (This is one reason Beth trusted him.)
The repository guaranteed anonymity, so how did Donor White learn about his
kids? He seems an exceptionally warm and friendly man, he lived near the repository's
office, and repository employees, particularly Dora Vaux, were soon confiding
in him. Vaux, who more or less ran the repository, was looser with her tongue
than she should have been. (She divulged the full
name of a donor to at least one mother—not something a confidential
sperm bank should ever let slip.) Vaux told Donor White the birthdays of all
his kids and gave him baby pictures of 11 of them. She allowed him to meet
infant Joy and correspond with Beth. She also accidentally revealed the identity
of two children, a brother and sister.
Donor White became an enthusiast for the repository. In 1991, he published an
article in a local women's magazine praising the bank. ("And Now a Word
from a [Sperm Bank] Father" appeared under the pseudonym "R.
White.") In the late '90s, Donor White asked the repository to let him
study its birth records. He hoped to learn if sperm banks confirmed the finding
in nature that couples in which the biological father is much older than the
mother tend to disproportionately have boys. The repository never responded.
Of all his repository children, Joy was dearest to Donor White. She was the
only one he met, and Beth was the only mother Donor White corresponded with.
(Beth, who heard from Dora Vaux about Donor White's Confederate dream, even
sent him a photograph of Joy with a Confederate soldier at a Civil War
re-enactment. "I felt a tingling all over as I saw how much that soldier
looked like the man in my dream," says Donor White.)
When the repository stopped their letters, he was heartbroken. Donor White made
his own desperate, fruitless search for Beth and Joy. He had figured out what
state they lived in (one picture of Joy bore the address of a photography
studio) and guessed at their last name based on a few clues in a letter. He
wrote a cryptic note to the only person in the state with that name in hopes
that she would reply. He guessed wrong. He longed to meet Joy again and assumed
he never would.
sidebar
American doctors started using sperm donors regularly in the 1950s, and from
the beginning, anonymity was the rule. For decades, doctors didn't even keep
records about who gave what to whom. Parents didn't want to know, because
almost every family pretended the "social" father was the biological
father. The rise of sperm banks in the '80s created a market for donors, as
banks sought the smartest, healthiest, sportiest, tallest men they could find,
and eagerly advertised their talents. (Click here
to read a story about how finding sperm donors has become like shopping for a
car.) The sperm banks continued to insist on absolute donor anonymity.
But no law mandates anonymity, and about 20 years ago, the progressive Sperm
Bank of California pioneered an "identity-release" program. When they
gave sperm, donors could agree to be identified when their children turned 18,
if the children were curious. The first "ID-release" kids turned 18
last fall, but so far none has contacted a donor. Other small sperm banks are
experimenting with similar programs, but none has advanced as far as the Sperm
Bank of California's. Sweden, New Zealand, and parts of Australia have passed
laws allowing donors to be identified, though no children have reached
adulthood since those laws passed.
sidebar
The repository, like all sperm banks, imposed double anonymity for legitimate
reasons. It hid the identity of the donor so that parents didn't make financial
or emotional demands on him. Many donors don't want to know their sperm bank
offspring, and the bank has an obligation to protect their privacy. And the
bank kept the identity of parents secret to protect the family. A couple might
want to pretend the social father was the biological father, and the bank had
no business interfering with that.
Slate wanted to tell the
story of the repository, but without violating the privacy of families and
donors. So we made it an all-volunteer series: Because the sperm bank was so
private, we only wrote about people who wanted
to tell their stories. And Slate
would not violate the confidentiality of donors who don't want
to be found. There are repository donors I have talked to who don't want to
hear from offspring, and Slate won't
help the families that want to get in touch with them. We did not impose on Beth or Donor White. They
came to us on their own. If Donor White didn't want to be found, he didn't have
to contact us. Donor White made a decision that the happiness he could receive
from getting to know Joy and Beth outweighed the risks of ending his anonymity.
Beth's family is slightly trickier. Beth decided on behalf of her daughter that
they should know the donor. Beth is a mother and has the parent's right to make
decisions for her child. But the case of Joy's social father is more
complicated. He did not have a say about whether to contact Donor White.
According to Beth, Joy's social father was surprised but "not angry,"
that Beth made contact with the donor. He told Beth, "I have always been
her father and always will be. Make sure she knows that."
Donor White and Beth decided that knowing each other was more important than
the repository's confidentiality rules, and accepted that their decision could
create turmoil for Joy's social father. Slate
decided that these were not its secrets to keep.
sidebar
Like most sperm banks, the repository limited the number of children a donor
could father. In theory, the repository sent a donor into retirement after 10
children, making exceptions only to allow a family to have a sibling using the
same donor. But in practice, repository policy may have been a bit looser,
since Robert Graham did not have an easy time recruiting star donors. Several
donors seem to have fathered many more than 10 children in more than 10
families. Since many of the repository's customers lived in Southern
California, there is a remote but real possibility that half-siblings could
meet each other (and who knows what else) without knowing it.
sidebar
Beth writes: "I knew enough about the donor from Dora Vaux not to be
threatened by him. I knew that he was happily married for many years, but had
no children of his own, despite having wanted them. I … was disarmed by his
warmth and openness. We received a letter from him in 1995 and he referred to
himself and his wife as 'Honorary Grandparents' and he just felt like family.
If the donor was a young unmarried college student or a man with children of
his own, we might not have sought out contact, and I certainly would never have
pursued him if I thought he wasn't willing to make contact. The circumstances
in this particular case make contact a pleasant reality.”
When Donor White Met Joy
Slate helped the Nobel Prize sperm bank's "Donor
White" and his biological daughter find each other. Here's what happened
when they met.
By David Plotz
Posted Friday, Dec. 20, 2002, at 9:01 AM PT
The article that generated by far the most reader response described the hunt
for Donor White. The piece, which you can read here,
recounted the story of "Beth" and her now 12-year-old daughter,
"Joy." Beth, whose husband had had a vasectomy, conceived Joy using
sperm from the repository donor identified as "White No. 6."
According to the description in the
repository catalog, Donor White was an accomplished scientist born in the 1930s
who liked running and gardening. Employees at the repository told Beth that
other mothers who used Donor White had "happy babies." That's what
Beth got: a happy, blond infant, who has grown up into a happy, blond,
ballet-dancing, Harry Potter-loving, horseback-riding girl.
Beth always felt grateful to Donor White. Donor White, a family man who had
never been able to have children of his own, always yearned to know his sperm
bank offspring. (There are 19 of them, by his count.) When Joy was 7 months
old, Beth arranged to leave her for a few hours at the repository office so
that Donor White and his wife could stop by and see his daughter. It was an
unforgettable visit for Donor White. Later, the repository allowed Beth and
Donor White to send warm letters and holiday cards. (The repository erased all
identifying details.) But in 1997, the sperm bank stopped the correspondence,
saying it threatened confidentiality. Beth and Donor White were disappointed.
Each tried to find the other by piecing together clues from their
correspondence. Each failed.
In early 2001, Beth saw the first Seed articles and wrote Slate asking for help. "A Mother
Searches for Donor White" appeared on Feb. 27, 2001, inviting Donor White
to contact me confidentially. For 15 months, we heard nothing. Then, on June
12, an e-mail from Donor White arrived in my in-box (plotz@slate.com,
for anyone else connected to the repository who wants to reach me. I will treat
all contacts as confidential). Donor White longed to meet Beth and Joy. A few
days later, after verifying Donor White was who he claimed, I introduced them
by e-mail. In the most recent Seed installment, I chronicled
Donor White's discovery and the loving, intimate correspondence that sprang up
between him and Beth and Joy. I promised to report back after they all met in
person.
A few weeks after that article appeared in August, Beth and Joy traveled to
California to see Donor White. Both Beth and Donor White wrote me long e-mails
about the four days they spent together. This was a small family reunion, but a
historic one. It was one of the first times that an anonymous sperm donor and
his child have met. And Donor White's e-mail below is the first time a sperm
donor has described what it's like to meet his genetic child—a child that is
both his and not his.
Here is what Donor White and Beth wrote.
From Donor White:
Ever since meeting my baby daughter Joy at the Repository, I have felt that one
day I would have the opportunity to see her again, no matter how improbable
that seemed. Now, some 11 years later, that has happened in a wonderful visit.
I will give you my best attempt to describe the four-day visit that my wife and
I had with Joy and her mom, Beth, but I start out doubting that words will be
adequate to describe my true feelings. My mind is so flooded with pleasant
memories that I hardly know where to start, so I will simply try to recall
certain things in the order in which they occurred. After a simultaneous neck
hug and introduction, Joy presented me with one of her proudest possessions,
her first trophy from an athletic contest. I knew what this meant to her and
asked if maybe she would swap her trophy for some of my too-large T-shirts from
running events that might serve as night gowns for her. We were both happy with
the trade. She had also selected a group of photographs that she wished me to
have, and by the next day I was able to find some that I hoped she might like
to have.
We played a videotape of her most recent youth ballet performance, as she gave
us advanced warnings as to when to expect a leap of surprising height, which
gave me some hint as to the gymnastics that would come the next couple of days
on visits to the beach.
They brought a whole suitcase filled with photograph albums and scrapbooks to
fill us in on Joy from her birth up to the present time. I also had photos to
show them, including baby pictures of 10 of Joy's half-siblings [which were
sent to Donor White by the Repository, no names attached], so we spent a good
deal of time at home looking at photos and becoming better acquainted.
In looking through a scrapbook, I saw where Joy had written her name in neat
and uniform printing at age 4. She had also composed a song then that had made
such an impression on her kindergarten teacher that she had her repeat it so
that it could be copied and given to her mom. The song dealt with the care and
feeding of a favorite stuffed animal and I would love to quote it exactly, but
if any of this should ever appear on the Internet it is certain that her
teacher would remember such a unique song. Joy now plays a difficult musical
instrument, but rather than her own playing (with which she is not yet
satisfied) she brought me a CD of professional performances of the same numbers
on which she is practicing. She said that she thought that I might like to use
this as background music on my computer while I sent e-mail and visited Web
sites. I had no idea that music could be played at the same time that one did
other tasks on the computer, so Joy showed me how this was done.
There were many things about Joy that made me realize what a sharp and quick
mind that she had, but I will take time here to tell of only a few of these. I
told her about how much she reminded me of my much younger sister, who spoke in
complete sentences well before she was 2 years of age. Joy said: "Yes, but
she was mostly around you and other adults and never heard much baby
talk." I also spoke of having earned two master's degrees in technical
subjects by going to school part-time at night while working but never having
been financially situated to take a year or two off to be able to earn a Ph.D.
She said: "When you have the knowledge, a Ph.D. is only a piece of
paper." This is not true in the real world, of course, as a piece of paper
can mean a great deal, but it was a surprising thing to hear from one so young,
and it would be rather nice if it were true.
I have enjoyed genealogy as a hobby for many years and have been able to
identify 28 of the 32 great-great-great-great-grandparents that Joy has from my
side of the family, with knowledge on some of these family lines going back 11
generations to 1635. I had summarized all of this in a fold-out diagram and had
no idea that she would be interested in this at present, but thought that she
might like to have the information later on. By the end of her visit here, much
to my surprise, she had figured out how many of these ancestors had received
their given names from earlier ancestors, and how surnames of others had become
part of the given names of their descendants. These are just a few of the many
examples that made me realize how well she could process information to reach
conclusions that were well beyond what should be expected for one her age.
When speaking with Joy, it is easy to forget that she is only 12 years old, as
conversations with her are much more like those with an adult. About all that
gives her away and brings one back to the reality that she has not yet entered
her teenage years is the youthful enthusiasm that shines forth from her sparkling
blue eyes when she speaks of things of special interest to her. There was also
no question about her age and love of life when she visited the beach, as she
loved to catch big waves and body surf onto the wet sandy beach, where she
turned cartwheels one after the other, before racing to leap high over a
collection of kelp that had washed ashore.
I had the opportunity to see Joy under about as many situations as could be
squeezed into portions of four days. Still, I was not able to find one thing about
her that I would wish to change, even down to the smallest of details. Let me
attempt to list what I liked best about Joy, in order of importance: 1) she is
healthy, happy, well-mannered, modest, unspoiled, and is considerate of others;
2) she has obvious talent in dance and music; 3) she is athletic and does well
in several sports; 4) she has a sharp and quick mind that allows her to take
new facts and rapidly use them to make interpretations that are truly
surprising for one only 12 years of age; and 5) her appearance is very
pleasing. Indeed, I believe that most people would agree with me that she is
beautiful, but Joy herself says that appearances are unimportant and that it is
the quality of the person within that really matters. Needless to say, she has
captured our hearts forever, and my wife is just as impressed with her as is
her proud biological father.
I believe that she has the potential to be and to do almost anything that she
wishes, but she has so many interests that it is impossible to know in what
direction she might go. I do not mean to imply from this most favorable of
impressions that Joy serves to demonstrate the validity of Dr. Graham's ideas
regarding outcomes that could be achieved by his sperm bank through the careful
selection of donors and recipients, because Joy has received the best of
opportunities that could be provided by a family of moderate income living in a
small town without the resources of large cities. Whatever the relative
importance of the various factors were that have given Joy so much potential,
there is no question that she is a fine example of what Dr. Graham had hoped to
achieve through his sperm bank, but certainly the major credit for this must go
to the influence of her mom and the man whom she considers to be her real
father.
Joy and Beth have been gone only a short time, but they are greatly missed in
our home, which seems more empty and lonely now. We will be forever grateful to
Beth for being willing to share Joy with us, and the beautiful background music
to which I am listening as I type this message (thanks to Joy's instructions)
will keep her and her visit fresh in my mind until we are again able to meet. A
very slow recovery from extensive surgery presented difficulties in my travel
and made it better for them to visit us for our first meeting. However, our
meeting has now motivated me to be well enough by next summer to visit them in
their hometown.
In the meantime, despite a very busy schedule after the start of school, Joy
and I plan to stay in touch by e-mail. My meeting with her has given me much
more reason to wish to get better and stay around long enough to see her reach
more of the potential that I know that she has.
Donor White, proud biological father of Joy
From Beth:
The visit with Donor White and his wife was wonderful. I will always remember
it as four perfect days. The visit was so easy, it was like getting together
with old friends. I've wondered how it was possible that we were so comfortable
and I've come up with a few thoughts. The donor and his wife are nice and
down-to-earth people, not pretentious at all, and good company, too.
We had become pretty well-acquainted by e-mail before the visit and we were
prepared to like each other. I told Joy before the trip, "I just love
these people in advance." She thought that was funny and I explained that
they had given me such a gift (her), that I just loved them. I told her that
the donor and his wife had wanted children in their marriage, but weren't able
to have any and were willing to help me, someone they didn't know, get what I
wanted most in life.
When I first entered their home, we hugged and his wife said, "Thank
you." I was bringing my daughter to visit as my way of thanking them and
she was thanking me!
When she and I got a chance to talk alone, I told her that I was very impressed
at how open-minded they both were, and she said simply, "Well, I knew a
lot of ladies who were wanting babies, I know what they went through." I
would like to remind your readers that the donor did not seek to become
involved with the Repository, they sought him, he was never paid. His wife told
me that the person who recruited Donor White was very persuasive, and he was
not initially interested in becoming involved.
I knew that Donor White would be taken with my daughter—she is easy to love—and
I knew that she would enjoy meeting him and getting to know him and his wife:
She loves people. I think that meeting her biological father will be more
important to her as she gets older and starts having a family of her own. I
think it did help her at this time to hear his stories, look at his family
albums. The donor has many amazing accomplishments and learning about some of
them was inspiring to her. I should add that my daughter is accustomed to
meeting family at intervals, connecting and then keeping in touch via phone and
e-mail until another visit or vacation. We have no family locally; we are
spread out all over the country, so it is really not that odd of a situation.
When we were saying our goodbyes, I heard the emotion in her voice; it was hard
for her to say "goodbye," but half an hour later she was playing with
her friends and having a great time. I would not have agreed to this meeting if
I felt that it would cause her pain. I had prepared her in advance that meeting
this other family was a blessing, our daily lives were not going to change, her
Dad was still her Dad, but it doesn't hurt to have more people in her life to
care about and to have care about her. We plan to stay in touch and have more
visits in person.
This relationship is enjoyable for all of us, and it just feels right. We are
all sane adults who care about one little girl. I will always be grateful to
the Repository, and especially to Donor White and his wife.
Beth and Donor White hope their story will
inspire other Donor White families to seek them out. Beth would like to find
half-siblings for Joy. Donor White would love to know more about his biological
children.
To other parents who conceived children
using Donor White's sperm: If you would like to be in touch with Donor White or
with your child's half-sister, Joy, and Joy's mom, Beth, please e-mail me at plotz@slate.com or call me at (202) 261-1370. All contacts will be considered
confidential.
If you are a parent, child, or donor
connected with the Repository for Germinal Choice, and you want to find lost
relatives or talk about your experience, Slate wants to hear from you. Please e-mail me at plotz@slate.com or call me at (202) 261-1370. All contacts will be considered
confidential.
David Plotz is Slate's Washington editor. If you are interested in sharing any information
about the Repository for Germinal Choice, send it to plotz@slate.com.