Who's your daddy?

The Nobel Prize Sperm Bank never fulfilled its mission of breeding geniuses. But it did bring 200 children into the world -- and now they're asking questions about where, exactly, they came from.

By Andrew Leonard

Jun 30, 2005 | David Plotz's history of the notorious Nobel Prize Sperm Bank, "The Genius Factory," could have been a pure romp. The characters are too larger-than-life, the events depicted too ridiculous not to be nonfiction: William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, jacking off to save the world from mediocrity? It doesn't get better than that.

Or, Plotz could have confined himself to something more sobering. At the heart of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank's appeal was founder Robert Graham's belief that if smart people didn't make more babies, the world would be overcome by the dumb and infirm. His proposal to solve this problem, by stocking his bank with sperm from carefully selected geniuses, was nutty eugenic racism, but the day isn't far off when parents will be able to specify exactly what genes they do or don't want. Working out the law and ethics to handle such a future will be a gnarly challenge, and that alone provides grist enough for a book.

But Plotz one-ups both approaches, and pulls off the tricky feat of taking readers on a trip both serious and silly. So we get hilarity, and Hitler. We get a brief history of eugenics, and we get Plotz himself entering a sperm bank's "masturborium" for some first-, uh, hand reporting on semen donation. (His contribution passes the bank's requirements, but he declines to become an actual donor.) In between the alarming and the absurd, we also get something more, something unexpected: an ongoing, fascinating and deeply felt meditation on fatherhood and family.

One of the oddities of story of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank is that its founder, while crucial to the bank's genesis, isn't at the crux of the tale. Robert Graham, a millionaire who made his money by perfecting plastic lenses for eyeglasses, is an odd bird, a man who, Plotz writes, believed that the "genius factory was nothing less than the most important project of mankind, because it was the only possible salvation of a genetically doomed world." A self-made man, Graham believed that half-wits were proliferating, "that prosperity had ruined mankind, because it had reversed human evolution."

But the real story of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank revolves around the newfangled "families" that it brought into being. The theory behind Graham's project may have been crackpot, but the result was undeniably real: babies, some 200 of them over the 20-odd years of the bank's existence. The story of these families isn't something that Plotz merely recounts: He becomes an integral part of it.

Plotz is an editor and writer at Slate magazine; "The Genius Factory" grew out of a series of articles he published there that chronicled both the history of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank and his own attempts to track down children and donors associated with the bank. After an initial article, Plotz put out a call for donors and children via the Internet. At first the pickings were slim, and mostly anonymous, but Plotz kept plugging away, cultivating relationships via e-mail, occasionally upgrading to the telephone, and eventually, in a few cases, taking on face-to-face contact. He becomes, to his own surprise, a matchmaker of sorts, a go-between who helps to set up meetings between fathers and children. He is even present at those meetings; he becomes a confidant, and a surrogate father. To one donor, he is an "agent of destiny."

But being an agent of destiny isn't always easy. The real drama of "The Genius Factory" takes place near the end, when a young man named "Tom" meets, for the first time, his biological father, "Jeremy." (Nearly all the donors and children in "The Genius Factory" are referred to by pseudonyms.)

Tom's life hasn't been a smooth ride. A middling student, he grew up feeling unconnected with his putative father, "Alvin." When his mother tells him, in 2001 when he's 15, that his actual father was a donor to the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank and was most likely a famous scientist (perhaps even Jonas Salk!), he feels all topsy-turvy. On the one hand, it makes sense; he never felt connected to his father. On the other, it's confusing; he doesn't feel much like a genius.

That's only the beginning of Tom's confusion, though, because it turns out that Jeremy is no Nobel Prize winner, no genius of any type at all. He's a fast-talking scammer, a one-time medical student who weaseled himself into Graham's bank by sweet-talking his way through the vetting process and lying about his IQ. Today, he lives in a hovel in South Florida, surrounded by filth and cockroaches. In addition to his sperm bank spawn, he has sired a large number of children by a variety of women, few of whom he appears to support financially. Instead of a dream come true, he's a worst-case scenario for a fatherly role model.

By now, Tom, still a teenager, is a father himself, and is working long hours trying to keep his own fragile family together. For everyone present, including Plotz, the meeting is full of poignant imponderables and ambiguities. Tom is glad to have met his "real" father, but he doesn't feel a bond with him. Plotz wonders whether he should have helped set up the meeting at all.

Next Page: Geneticists agree: You can't count on geniuses breeding geniuses, particularly over just one generation

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