The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  Graham told Edward that his sperm had produced several children, but Edward never asked exactly how many. He didn’t want to know. He told me he never thought about the kids. Did he care what became of them? I asked. Not really, because they were not his.

  A couple of days after our first conversation, I published an interview with Edward in Slate. Edward wouldn’t let me publish his donor color code, for fear that parents or children would try to hunt him down, so I gave him the pseudonym “Donor Entrepreneur.” I feared that Edward’s story—highlighting as it did his doubts about the Repository’s goals and his indifference to his biological kids—might discourage anyone else from contacting me.

  Instead, Edward’s story shook the trees. Within days, I had heard from half a dozen other donors. Several of them had seen Edward’s comments and wanted to rebut him. Unlike him, most were true believers. They did think the Repository made a difference. It was not ocean pissing.

  The notable fact about these donors: none of them was a Nobel laureate, either. Why did the “Nobel Prize” sperm bank not seem to have any Nobel Prize donors? I wouldn’t learn the answer till later.

  These donors were a long, long way from the Nobel Prize, in fact. They were a motley lot, not exactly unimpressive but certainly not the great minds of the age. A couple were university professors. There was a former math prodigy—a cheerily self-proclaimed “failure”—who had quit academia to become a sculptor. There was a graduate student who had aced his SAT. There was another former prodigy, who had a gigantic IQ but whose job was doing extremely low-level work for intelligence agencies. And then there was a political activist of a particularly loathsome stripe. I recognized his name from news stories about his repellent ideas. Graham had recruited him at a political conference. (The thought that there could be more kids with his genes growing up across America filled me with dread. I was relieved when he told me that the sperm bank had rejected him for unspecified medical reasons.) All the successful donors said they had been flattered when the Repository had asked them to participate and had contributed eagerly. (One of them had volunteered his services to Graham.) Unlike Edward, these donors did want to hear about their offspring, maybe even meet them.

  There was one Nobel connection among the donors who contacted me, but it wasn’t what I expected. I received a note from “Michael,” who said he would be glad to tell me about being a donor. Michael’s last name sounded familiar, and when I asked him about it, he said that, yes, he was the son of Nobel prize–winning scientist .

  I was intrigued. How had a Nobelist’s son become a Nobel sperm bank donor? Michael was very cagey—living in his father’s shadow seemed to trouble him—but after much back-and-forth, he agreed to let me visit him in Dallas. He picked me up at the airport driving a wreck of a car. Michael was about fifty years old. He was tall and alarmingly gaunt: when he folded himself into the driver’s seat, he looked like a praying mantis. He spoke in a high-pitched, hesitating voice that immediately grated on me.

  We drove back to his condo. His wife wasn’t home. He directed me to sit down in the living room. Except for small islands around the couch and TV, every inch of floor space was covered with flowering plants. Their perfume was almost overpowering.

  Michael, I learned, was a man of little renown. It was not clear whether he had a job. He taught piano occasionally. But it was obvious within minutes of meeting him that Michael’s true calling was donating sperm. He referred to sperm donation, unironically, as “work.” As in “I continued to work for that fertility doctor, but I looked around for more work.” He was the only person I have ever heard of—outside the porn industry—who thought of masturbation as labor.

  Michael didn’t mean that sperm donation was “work” in the sense that he did it to earn a living. All the banks except the Repository had paid him a little, but he would have done it for free. No, he called it “work” because it was the most productive activity in his life.

  Michael said he’d gotten hooked on sperm donation in the mid-1970s when he’d read an article in Playboy: “You can be a sperm donor.” He had just finished his music degree and was living in the Northwest. He soon found plenty of “work.” “I started calling around to obstetricians and gynecologists until I found one who wanted me.” He had “worked” for the first doctor, then found others and started supplying them, too. (In those days, before large sperm banks were so popular, many doctors collected and distributed their own sperm.) As we talked, he ticked off his employers on his fingers. “Oh, there were probably half a dozen doctors I worked for, plus two or three sperm banks.” All in all, he had spent fifteen years masturbating. It had, he admitted, been exhausting.

  Michael said he had volunteered himself to Robert Graham in the mid-1980s. Graham, though he had stopped recruiting actual laureates, was thrilled to add Michael’s second-generation Nobel genes to his bank. The Repository catalog hinted coyly at his Nobel heritage, describing an accomplished musician with an “outstanding history of achievement . . . in his family.” (Michael acknowledged what I had suspected: his father had been one of Graham’s three original Nobel donors, though he hadn’t stuck with it. Because the dad had quit, Graham might have been more eager to bank the son’s seed.)

  Michael and his wife had no children of their own, but Michael’s eagerness to reproduce had not faded with age. The only reason he had stopped donating was that he was now so old that sperm banks wouldn’t accept him anymore. He tried to work around the age restriction. He recently learned that one sperm bank he had donated to was merely storing his sperm for the future, not distributing it to clients, so he pestered the bank to return the stored samples to him. He wanted to give away the samples himself. He placed ads in a local newspaper volunteering his sperm to lesbian couples and single women. He was hoping to find a woman who would let him stay in touch with the child. Not that he intended to financially support the kid or be a father—he just wanted to check in when it was convenient. When I wondered how many kids he had fathered, Michael stopped to pause and calculate. He guessed fifty, including fifteen through the Nobel sperm bank.

  I asked him why he had spent the best years of his life donating sperm. Michael lit up. “When I heard about being a sperm donor, I thought, this is great! I am helping women. I am helping the human race because I have good genes. And I am passing on my genes.”

  He leaned in, his voice urgent, his skeletal fingers pointing at me. “I have studied evolutionary biology, and this is what evolution is all about. Winning is passing on your genes, and losing is failing to do so. There are lots of games that men have made up, games where you win by scoring runs.” He paused, as if to emphasize the pointlessness of such games. “But the main game of the universe, the only game that matters, is the game of evolution, and you win by passing on genes. And I wanted to win!” He spoke this last sentence with a smug grin. It was just about the creepiest thing I have ever heard anyone say.

  Sitting in his depressing condo, I looked at Michael and thought, You are genetic victory?

  Michael, I realized glumly, was the living test of Robert Graham’s theory. He was the son of one of Graham’s original Nobel donors: in other words, exactly the kind of person Graham aspired to create. Michael was the finished product of Graham’s logic—blessed with allegedly magnificent Nobel genes. Yet all I saw in him was the fickleness of DNA: Here was a Nobel Prize baby, and he was no prize at all.

  While I was talking to donors, I began to hear from parents with children by the Repository as well. The first to e-mail me were mothers who had read about Edward. I wrote about these mothers in Slate, and other parents saw those stories and contacted me, which led to more articles. Each story attracted another few parents and kids, until eventually I was in touch with two dozen families. The Internet did exactly what my editors and I had hoped: it allowed readers to collaborate with me to discover the lost history of the Repository.

  The first Repository parent I actually met was “Lorraine O’Brien.” A couple we
eks after my first article, I traveled to see her. I had found Lorraine, rather than her finding me. I had seen her name in an old newspaper article about the Repository. Lorraine was taken aback that I had located her—the newspaper reporter had been supposed to keep Lorraine anonymous, and Lorraine had never seen the finished article with her real name in it—but she agreed to see me anyway.

  Lorraine was a neurologist, and I dropped by her exceptionally busy practice one afternoon in February. Lorraine was a brunette in her early forties. She was funny, fast-talking, conservative, beautiful, and ruthless. She was full of advice, most of it smart, all of it absolutely certain. Lorraine said she had three kids, a ten-year-old boy and six-year-old twins, one boy and one girl. The Nobel sperm bank’s “Donor Fuchsia” had been the father of all of them.

  Many of the moms I was hearing from were doctors, nurses, or psychologists. As I talked to Lorraine, I understood why this was so. Lorraine said that she saw the miserable consequences of poor health every day at work. So when she went shopping for sperm banks in 1990, she wanted to ensure her donor was a Grade A specimen. The Repository told her far more about its donors’ health and accomplishments than any other bank would. The Repository let her interview its manager and peruse the catalog. Eventually, she concluded it was the only bank rigorous enough to father her children.

  But health wasn’t the only reason Lorraine had chosen the Nobel sperm bank. She was also an unabashed elitist. “When you are growing fruits and vegetables, you don’t pick the bad ones and try to grow them. You pick the best. Same with kids.”

  She went to the Repository because she wanted superkids, and as far as she was concerned, she got them. The very first thing she told me about her kids was “They’re wonderful children. They are like royal children.” She thrust pictures of them at me. Other parents, she declared, loved her children. Friends volunteered to babysit them: “Do you know what kind of kids you have to have for people to volunteer to babysit them?”

  Then she announced, “I’m a great mother,” as if daring me to contradict her. Her ex-husband was no father at all to the children, she said. “I am the exclusive provider of food, money, shelter, emotional support. . . . They do not have a bond with him.” She more than compensated for him, she said, by being such a relentless parent. “When my kids were babies, some other moms and I—all of us obsessive-compulsive women—formed a group called ‘better baby salon’ to raise morally intelligent children. . . . I read everything about raising children, good and bad, because you have to take care of that yourself.”

  Her kids had become paragons of achievement. Here are some of my notes from the conversation: “99th percentile . . . best school in the county . . . student of the month . . . little angel . . . their Valentines were the best in the class . . . her coach said he had never seen a faster runner . . . unbelievable . . . never had in my entire teaching career a child who is as emotionally balanced as this child . . . enrichment classes.”

  The Nobel sperm bank was intended as a scientific experiment to prove how nature trumped nurture. But Lorraine was evidence why the bank could never show that. Her kids might outperform regular kids, but that proved nothing about heredity versus environment. Graham’s customers had not been randomly plucked off the streets of San Diego. They had chosen the Nobel sperm bank, and they were the kind of parents you would expect to pick a Nobel sperm bank. Lorraine had gone there because she cared passionately that her kids be standouts. Even if Lorraine had gone to Tony’s Discount Sperm Warehouse, her children would have been achievers: she wouldn’t have let them be any other way.

  I don’t mean this negatively; hyperinvolved parents are often the best kind. I hope I can do as much for my kids’ lives as Lorraine did for hers. But I didn’t want to mistake her children’s accomplishments for genius. I am skeptical of the high-achieving child, perhaps because I was once one myself. I tested outrageously well. I aced my SATs at age eleven. My teachers were always predicting a glorious career in mathematics, medicine, or philosophy. But what looked like genius was simply good parenting. I was a pliant, reasonably intelligent, eager-to-please child with bright, attentive parents. Of course I did well in school. By the time I hit college, when I met the real geniuses, the people with incomprehensibly dazzling minds, I recognized I wasn’t one of them or anything like them. So I knew just how little being a ten-year-old prodigy meant—and how cautious I should be about ascribing any child’s accomplishments to the Repository’s superior sperm.

  As Lorraine boasted about her kids, she also kept insisting that they were “normal”—or, as she put it, “NORMAL!” They were “not nerds,” she said emphatically. Lorraine’s insistence on normality at first befuddled me. But eventually I traced it to the deeply democratic habits of Americans, so deep they still register in a woman as elitist as Lorraine. Graham’s notion of breeding only for intelligence disturbed even her. If all men are created equal, then manufacturing an extraordinary child seems almost anti-American. America admires its Thomas Edisons and Bill Gateses when they grow up, but Gates-like kids are ridiculed. The genius child is considered a nerd or a freak. Instead, we cherish all-arounders. There’s no glory in being a math prodigy, but a math prodigy who can play basketball, that’s cool. That was why Lorraine kept battering me with that word “normal” and why Graham’s Nobel effort had been quixotic: he was trying to sell a product—pure intelligence—that most Americans didn’t really want. Even Lorraine, a mother of immeasurable ambition, didn’t want me to perceive her children as too intelligent. It was when I talked to Lorraine that I started to understand why Graham had to recruit non-Nobelists like Edward Burnham as donors: parents really didn’t value the Nobel brain above all else.

  For a while, Lorraine and I avoided talking about one obvious subject: Donor Fuchsia. I sensed some anxiety in her about him, some tension in her otherwise assured manner. Gradually, she told me little bits about him. He was not a Nobelist, but he was an Olympic gold medalist. He had also written a book. (That was why she had chosen him, because he was well rounded, “not weird or nerdy.”) Finally, forty-five minutes into our conversation, she blurted out, “I have seen pictures of him.”

  Then she said, “Dora Vaux [the Repository’s manager in the early 1990s] told me his real name.”

  I stuttered that revealing his name to a mother was surely against the rules. Lorraine, who would probably break the law of gravity if it displeased her, agreed but said that was irrelevant because she had really wanted to know it.

  Then Lorraine told me his name and how he had won his gold medal. I felt guilty even hearing the name: Lorraine shouldn’t have possessed this secret, and neither should I. I steered the conversation back to her kids, but a few minutes later, she mentioned Donor Fuchsia again. “I have a huge file on him, you know. I have not used it for anything in particular. I am just curious about what he is doing now.”

  A few minutes later, she said, “Supposedly, the guy is just my age. Dora told me that his girlfriend got really sick, with leukemia, and he stuck by her. And he helped Dora move. She says he is the most incredible person.

  “And he’s not married. He never got married.”

  Again, a little later, “I thought about calling him, but I don’t know what his feelings about this are. I thought we might meet serendipitously and fall madly in love, and he would become the father of his own children. That would be a movie and a half!”

  Then, as she was saying good-bye, “I thought he and I might meet someday. Wouldn’t that be a story and a half?”

  When I heard this, I thought I finally understood why Lorraine had agreed to talk to me: she hoped I would find Fuchsia for her. I doubted that this was a conscious plan, but it explained why she kept telling me more than she should have about him. And it explained why she had kept hinting about them meeting. She realized that she couldn’t track him down herself. It would be too awkward. But it wouldn’t be awkward for me. I had the reporter’s excuse for calling him. If he didn’t want to talk
to me, no one’s feelings would be hurt, no one’s ego bruised.

  So when I got back to Washington, I set to work locating Fuchsia. It’s harder than you might think to find an Olympic gold medalist, but eventually I turned up a cell phone number. I called him. I told him I had heard he had been a donor to the Nobel sperm bank. I reassured him that I wouldn’t reveal his name. (I did not tell him “A woman who has three of your children knows your identity. She might like to meet you and fall in love and have you become a real father to your children. And wouldn’t that be a story and a half?”)

  He listened quietly. He didn’t deny that he was Fuchsia, but he asked to continue the conversation by e-mail. I sent him an e-mail, and he replied the next day that after serious consideration he had decided not to talk to me, or to “participate in [my] endeavor.”

  At the time, I didn’t tell Lorraine about his refusal to talk. What would it have done except spoil her dream? When I saw her again two years later, I did tell her. But she had a new boyfriend then and seemed unbothered that Fuchsia didn’t want to meet his children or her.

  The failure with Fuchsia marked the beginning of my new and entirely unexpected career: sperm private investigator. My encounter with Lorraine made me realize that the real reason she and other mothers would talk to me was not to validate Robert Graham’s eugenic sperm bank or even to brag about their children. Rather, they wanted my help. There was an emotional void in their lives. They dreamed of finding donors and half siblings for their kids. Until I came along, they’d had nowhere to look. The bank was closed; there were no public records. Thanks to my project, I was learning the identities of donors, children, and parents, information that was supposed to stay private forever. They realized before I did that I might be able to introduce people who hadn’t been connected except when sperm met egg five or ten or twenty years ago.