by David Plotz
Graham invited Muller to California to discuss The Future of Man and the potential sperm bank. On June 5, 1963, they met at the Pasadena Sheraton and agreed to establish a sperm bank for “outstanding individuals.” Graham went along with Muller’s suggestion that the bank seek both “high intelligence and cooperativeness.” It must have been a funny encounter: the two aging men—Graham was fifty-six, Muller was seventy-three—planning solemnly to remake the world. Graham fawning over the Nobelist, whom he idolized; Muller bemused by the sycophantic millionaire. They floated names of possible donors: Muller suggested evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous), geneticist James Crow, and DNA discoverer James Watson. Graham proposed Muller himself. Graham pledged $1,000 to buy storage tanks and liquid nitrogen and another $300 per year to maintain the bank.
Graham, who had a mania for formality, meticulously recorded an account of their meeting and their decision. Graham wrote: “After more discussion of various aspects of the undertaking, Robert Graham said, ‘Let’s put it over.’ To which Hermann Muller responded: ‘Yes.’ Thereupon the two shook hands and the project was launched.”
The Sheraton pact kicked off a two-year flurry of activity. The idea of a genius sperm bank was slightly outlandish for 1963 America, but not too much so. The United States was enjoying its post-Sputnik scientific renaissance, and the egalitarianism of the late 1960s hadn’t yet arrived. To scientists, politicians, and journalists, the genius sperm bank sounded prudent, not preposterous. Graham and Muller were taken very seriously. They proposed storing the sperm at Caltech, an idea the school contemplated without ridicule. They gathered a distinguished advisory board that included psychologist Raymond Cattell, ecologist Garrett Hardin (“The Tragedy of the Commons”), and Jerome Sherman, the Arkansas professor who had perfected the process of freezing and thawing sperm in 1953. Graham incorporated a nonprofit holding company for the planned bank, the “Foundation for the Advancement of Man.” Graham and Muller quarreled about what to name the bank, each trying to compliment the other. Muller proposed the “Robert K. Graham Repository for Germinal Choice.” Graham countered with “Hermann J. Muller Repository for Germinal Choice.” Graham, the superior flatterer, won, and named it after Muller.
Graham, Muller, and their advisers passionately debated which men were sufficiently outstanding to qualify as donors. Only geniuses? Or geniuses with good politics and big hearts? Graham and Muller contemplated elaborate, government-sponsored panels that would evaluate the worthiness of would-be parents and donors. Muller urged a waiting period: sperm could be released only twenty-five years after the donor’s death, so that his accomplishments could be judged worthy by history. The bank was larded with so much bureaucracy and pompous evaluation that it was doomed from the very start.
It was also doomed because Muller and Graham were terribly mismatched. They were working for exactly opposite ends. Graham was an elitist and political conservative. Muller was an egalitarian and socialist—strange traits in a genius sperm banker. Muller had insisted that donors be both smart and cooperative in order to serve his ambition of building a more egalitarian society. But Graham cared not a jot for Muller’s interest in cooperativeness. He was going into sperm banking to prevent the very socialist utopia that Muller dreamed of. Graham just wanted to breed more Edisons, brilliant men to rule over the bovine masses. Inevitably they quarreled. In 1965, Muller asked Graham to suspend the plans for the bank: better to wait and get it right, Muller warned presciently, than start too soon, be accused of a Hitlerian master-race scheme, and poison the whole project. Graham reluctantly agreed to suspend planning. But two years later, Muller died, and Graham was free of his strictures.
Even so, Graham set aside the genius sperm bank idea for a few more years. In 1971, he officially chartered the Hermann J. Muller Repository for Germinal Choice, but then he did no more. In the early 1970s, Graham handed off day-to-day control of Armorlite to his son Robin. In 1978, he sold the eyeglasses company to 3M for more than $70 million. Graham, who owned or controlled nearly all of it, was rich beyond reason. He took his cash, plowed it into real estate and other investments, and soon found himself with a fortune of $100 million or more.
In 1976, Graham was ready for genius sperm. He had just moved from Pasadena to the ten-acre estate in Escondido. He had plenty of room for the bank and, now that he wasn’t running Armorlite, plenty of time. It was the perfect moment, and the perfect place, for him to start. It’s no accident that the three most important sperm banks in the world—Graham’s Repository for Germinal Choice, the California Cryobank, and the Sperm Bank of California—all began in California in the late 1970s. The state’s progressivism and self-improvement ethos made it ideal soil for sperm banks: Customers, libertarian in their sexual and personal behavior, were willing to try anything. And Escondido was the just-right town for Graham’s brew of futurism and conservatism. Escondido was located halfway between San Diego, with its defense and biotech industries, and the Central Valley, California’s agricultural heartland. San Diego’s no-limits futurism was on one side of Graham, the Central Valley’s cultural conservatism on the other. With its hills bulldozed into housing developments, its glorious desert valleys irrigated into golf courses, Escondido had the feel of an engineered Eden, a naturally perfect place that man still thought he could improve. It was a place where anything seemed possible, as long as it didn’t raise property tax rates.
Graham was eager to get started, but he knew nothing about freezing sperm. He was an optometrist. He made inquiries and learned that a young lab technician named Stephen Broder was the man to see. Broder worked at the Tyler Clinic, Los Angeles’ leading fertility shop, and he had as much experience banking sperm as anyone did in 1976—which is to say, not much. Graham hired Broder to equip a small lab for him. Broder bought him a few microscopes, some storage vials, and two liquid-nitrogen tanks big enough to hold a few thousand sperm samples. Broder taught Graham how to “process” semen—to measure its potency, dilute it with a preservative solution, and store it in liquid nitrogen. Graham was already seventy years old, but he took to sperm collecting like a boy to baseball cards. He loved fiddling about with the small vials.
The idea of a genius sperm bank made a certain amount of sense, but never as much as Graham dreamed. Graham was making the best of the crude science of his time. If you were hoping to give kids better genes, this was all you could hope to do in the late 1970s. At the time, sperm collection was practically the only widely available fertility treatment that worked. Social science research was beginning to show that intelligence was at least partly heritable. So it was logical that if you were going to have a sperm bank, you might as well select smart men, rather than drag Joe Donors off the street, which is more or less what other banks were doing.
Nothing much was likely to go wrong with Nobel donors, but nor were they the great boon Graham believed they were. Graham thought his donors would supply a massive intelligence boost. In fact, the genetic improvement was probably minuscule. Nobel sperm would give modest odds of slightly better genes in the half share of chromosomes supplied by the father. And even then Graham would be operating on only the nature side of the equation: he had no control over nurture—schools, upbringing, parents. This was a formula for a B-plus student, not the “secular savior” Graham hoped to breed.
Graham puzzled over which men should stock his bank. At first he considered a military sperm bank—only West Point and Naval Academy grads. But eventually he returned to his original idea: the world’s smartest men. The best objective measure of useful intelligence, Graham thought, was the Nobel Prize—and not just any Nobel Prize but a Nobel Prize in the sciences. He had a narrow imagination about human accomplishment. Graham didn’t believe in “multiple intelligences”: He believed in one intelligence. When he talked about intelligence, all he meant was practical problem-solving ability: Edison, Fulton, Watson, or Crick. (Graham valued, by miraculous coincidence, exactly the same kind of analytical talent he himse
lf possessed.) He was blind to the intelligence required for artistic genius, for psychological insight, or for political deftness. Those kinds of intelligence were worthless to Graham, because they couldn’t be measured. Scientific ability could be counted in numbers of patents or an IQ score. There was no place for a Picasso or Roosevelt in Graham’s Pantheon. A Shakespeare play couldn’t light a city at night or fly to the moon. Inventors were the only people who changed the world, and it was their genes that needed saving. (Graham never grappled with a basic contradiction in his own thought: inventions made life more comfortable for the masses, yet Graham believed that comfort was what encouraged the shiftless and stupid to reproduce so rapidly. Thus the better the inventors made the world, the worse the evolutionary crisis.)
Graham always described the Repository as a “genius” sperm bank, yet in some ways he wasn’t actually seeking genius. The kind of genius in a Leonardo or an Einstein—incomprehensible, impossible for ordinary minds to follow—was too difficult for Graham. Partly Graham knew, as most scholars of genius have recognized, that it was impossible to manufacture an Einstein. Such transcendent genius arrived uninvited and unexpected, and tended to disappear, too. Einstein left no Einstein-like kids. But Graham also ignored that kind of genius because it didn’t match the intelligence he admired: high analytical and technical ability married to hard work. Graham wouldn’t have known what to do with an oddball like Einstein. He did know what to do with a dozen engineers.
With Muller dead, Graham felt free to make the bank he wanted to make. Graham scrapped Muller’s idea of waiting till a donor was twenty-five years dead before releasing the sperm: the world was going to hell too fast to wait. He also abandoned Muller’s altruism requirement for donors, which he had always thought was pointless. So in the late 1970s, Graham fired off flattering letters to all the Nobel Science laureates he could find in California. Their genes were precious, he told them. Could they do a good deed for the world? Would they share their glorious genetic heritage with desperate infertile couples?
When a Nobelist responded to a letter with even the slightest interest, Graham followed up with effusive phone calls to schedule a collection. He took Broder on his collecting expeditions, and both men loved the trips. Broder, still in his twenties, was starstruck when he met the laureates. Graham took pleasure in adding the Nobelists to his lifelong collection of Great Men. (Sometimes the sperm bank seemed a kind of supercharged autograph collection for Graham.) Graham was respectful toward the donors. He always called them “Doctor.” He read up on them in advance and asked them polite, informed questions about their work, but not too many, because he thought their time was precious. Even with the Nobelists, however, Graham was unbothered by the inherent awkwardness of asking a man to masturbate in a cup for him.
At first, Graham and Broder collected sperm nearby. They would book a pair of rooms at San Diego’s famed Torrey Pines Lodge and fly the donor in. The donor would perform in one room. They would immediately process the sample in the other. (“I don’t think we brought ‘inspirational literature,’ ” said Broder, using the industry euphemism for pornography. “They were older fellows and that did not seem appropriate.”) Sometimes Graham and Broder had to make peculiar accommodations. Broder had a strenuous arrangement with a donor he describes only as a “world-famous scientist” in Los Angeles. The scientist would call Broder and instruct him to drive by a particular intersection in Century City at a given time. When Broder pulled up, the scientist would open the passenger-side door of Broder’s car, drop in a paper bag containing the sample cup, and vanish. Broder would rush it back to his lab and ice it.
In the 1970s sperm collecting was new and mysterious, and Graham and Broder encountered bumps whenever they had to explain what they were doing. In July 1978, for example, Graham and Broder made their first long-distance sperm mission, flying to San Francisco to collect from William Shockley and a second Nobelist. After the Nobelists took care of business—Shockley in a room at the Travelodge—Broder and Graham returned to the Oakland airport toting a white plastic container filled with liquid nitrogen and semen ampules. They had never thought about how they would get onto the plane. X-rays cause mutations, so they couldn’t run the sperm samples through the X-ray machine. But they also couldn’t conceal the samples in an X-ray-proof lead-lined container, because airline security would reject it. They managed to sneak the container through security and avoid the X-ray machine, but when they got to their plane, the crew turned them away, and no wonder: liquid-nitrogen vapor escaping from the container was swirling out in a ghostly, sinister cloud. Even in 1978, you couldn’t carry mysterious, smoking packages on airplanes. The next day, they got on another flight. But before takeoff, the pilot came back to their seats and ordered them off. They begged him, insisted that all they were carrying was a few sperm samples. He relented, and the sperm made it home safely. After that, they shipped by bus and cargo plane.
By 1980, Graham was ready. He had collected sperm from three Nobelists, including Shockley—an “adequate” supply for his first customers. He also had semen from two other revered scientists who weren’t Nobelists. According to a former Graham employee, one of those two other scientists was Graham’s acquaintance Jonas Salk.
CHAPTER 3
THE SEMEN DETECTIVE
Who’s your daddy? Courtesy of California Cryobank
I didn’t really expect any children, parents, or donors from the Nobel sperm bank to respond to my February 8, 2001, Slate article asking them to contact me. I thought I might hear from some fakers and jokers, but that was all. I had read enough about sperm banks to know that most parents never told their kids that they were donor babies, so why would they spill the secret to a reporter? Moreover, the Repository had had very few children and donors: the bank had produced only about two hundred children and employed only a few dozen donors. The chances of any of them—let alone the few who’d be willing to talk—seeing a Slate article seemed vanishingly small.
As I waited anxiously to hear from them, I wondered how the reality of the Nobel sperm bank would compare to my own fantasies about it. Infected by Robert Graham’s grandiosity, I had conjured up creepy Boys-from-Brazil visions about the kids: What if they really were a regiment of amazing but scary children, pawns in a futuristic plot to alter humanity? What if the Nobel sperm bank parents were raising their enhanced babies in geodesic domes off the grid in Montana—Mensa moms nourishing their genius toddlers with a diet of brain-stimulating vitamins, Shakespeare, and calculus, biding their time till the genetic elite was old enough to seize control of the nation? It was possible, wasn’t it?
Less than twenty-four hours after my article was published, I received an e-mail from a man I’ll call Edward Burnham. He wrote that he was one of Robert Graham’s donors, and he wanted to tell me about it. I replied immediately and arranged a phone date for the next day. When I called, Edward immediately confirmed what I already knew from having done an Internet search on him: he wasn’t a Nobel laureate. I considered the possibility that he might be a fraud, but he was prepared for suspicion. He supplied me with names of bank employees, dates of his donations, his Repository medical records, his donor catalog entry, and even a leftover plastic vial, a souvenir from his last donation a decade ago.
Edward wasn’t a scientist, but he was the other type of man that Graham revered: a self-made businessman. He was in his late forties, and he had built three companies from the ground up and sold them. In 1985, Edward told me, Graham had seen him speak in San Diego. Graham had immediately set his cap at the young millionaire and invited him to donate to his sperm bank. Edward, assuming that it was still the “Nobel” sperm bank, wondered why Graham was pursuing him. Graham told Edward that he was no longer recruiting Nobel laureates. Instead he was now seeking donors more like Edward—Renaissance men who were smart, but also young, athletic, and handsome. Then in his early thirties, Edward reminded Graham of himself. Edward, too, was a rational entrepreneur. Edward’s companies, like
Graham’s Armorlite, turned theoretical technology into real profit. When I met Edward on his Arizona ranch months later, I understood the other reasons Graham had lusted after him as a donor: Edward looked the part of a superman, with a powerful chin, wonderful cheeks, piercing brown eyes, a mass of curly black hair, and the build of a linebacker. He also raced motorcycles and played soccer. (And he was a mensch. He told jokes, he made fun of himself, he asked questions.)
Edward refused Graham’s first invitation, but the sperm banker wouldn’t stop bothering him. Graham flattered Edward so much that “I started to feel like the dog at the dog breeders’ meeting,” Edward said. Edward had a girlfriend and he had pets, and they were obligation enough. He hated his own dad and had run away from home. Edward didn’t want children, didn’t much like them, and saw no particular reason to produce more of them for anyone else. But Graham would not relent. Edward could make some worthy women happy, Graham insisted, and he would bear no responsibility for the kids. Edward’s then girlfriend—hoping to get married and have children with him—lobbied him, too. She thought that once Edward donated sperm, his resistance to fathering his own kids would crumble. Eventually, Edward caved. He scoffed at Graham’s grand eugenic dreams—“I thought it was pissing in the ocean”—but he figured he would make a few women’s lives better, and his girlfriend and Graham would stop pestering him. To his surprise, Edward discovered he didn’t mind donating, and he gave for more than five years. (The girlfriend’s dream was dashed, though: he still didn’t want kids, and he still didn’t want to marry her. When Edward, his new girlfriend, and I went out to dinner, she told me she had resigned herself to not having kids with Edward but added wistfully, “I know we would have had beautiful intelligent babies, genius sperm bank babies.”)