Who's your daddy?

The scene is both sad and funny, but above all, it is blindingly real. In a single stroke, it captures the ludicrousness of Robert Graham's attempt to save the world. The Nobel Prize Sperm Bank never could have worked -- even if all its donors were certified geniuses. The kind of natural selection necessary to routinely breed anything works on a time scale just a bit longer than what Graham had in mind. Geneticists agree: You can't count on geniuses breeding geniuses, particularly over just one generation.

The Nobel Prize Sperm Bank may, in the final analysis, have been a failure; the vast majority of its donors never got within spitting distance of a Nobel, and the bank's likely impact on the quality of the human race will be nil. But it did work -- in a sense. It produced babies who had one very important thing in common: mothers who wanted a better life for their children. As Plotz discovered, perhaps the one factor that categorized all the children of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank was that their mothers were determined -- the kind of moms who, if their husbands were infertile or otherwise unable to do what was necessary, would look for the best breeding stock possible.

For example, "Samantha," the mother of another of "Jeremy's" sons, is an engineer at a high-tech company in Massachusetts. Her husband had had a vasectomy, and, writes Plotz, "her inner nerd loved the idea of a genius sperm bank. She was smart, she'd always been smart, and she wanted a smart kid."

So she raises one. Is it any surprise that on a day-to-day basis she is highly involved in her child's education and well-being? The paradox is ironic. The kind of mothers who would choose a donor from a Nobel Prize Sperm Bank, and thus place a bet on heredity, are precisely the kind of mothers who will also labor to make sure that the environment their children grow up in is as supportive as possible. So who's to say which is more important, nature or nurture?

It's a strange thing to do, to walk into a sperm bank and donate your semen, or to go there to get some sperm to make a baby. But an underlying theme of "The Genius Factory" is that our lives are only going to get stranger. The rate at which we are learning what role our genes play in our lives is accelerating at astonishing speed. It is not science fiction to predict that our children will have mind-boggling options for how their own children will be constructed. The eugenic issues raised by the sperm bank, as nutty as they were in the immediate context of Robert Graham and his half-baked racism, will be front and center when we can sit at a computer monitor and request genes for musical ability or mathematic brilliance.

But as bizarre as the science gets, and as amazing as the possibilities become, the result will still be babies, and families. Kids will grow up wondering how they came to be what they are, what their own life stories mean. The brilliance of "The Genius Factory" resides in its depiction of how these stories evolve over time. Marriages break apart, mothers tell their children the truth, sperm donors who originally never intended to be anything more than an anonymous donor find they want to see and meet their "children." Life gets complicated and messy, and every action taken has ramifications that could never be predicted.

It would be nice if we always had someone as thoughtful and clearheaded as Plotz to help us see our way through this increasingly dense tangle of biology and ethics and reproductive scientific miracles. Plotz has his own young children, and one can practically feel him subconsciously mulling over his future as a father as he investigates the unique new families created by sperm donation technology.

He'll be a good one, if the quality of the book that he's written is any indication. The role our genes play in our lives is a touchy subject, easy to abuse for racist or otherwise subversive purposes, and particularly sensitive in cases of children yearning to understand their own identities. Plotz negotiates every twist of their stories with grace and sensitivity, and places those stories on a firm bedrock of science and history. Throw in Plotz's sense of humor, and you have a great read.

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