The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  “It’s going better than I expected. He’s quite a bit like me. He’s kind of an intellectual, likes college, likes learning. He looks like me. We have the same way of talking, sort of. He is easy to talk to, not too quiet, not too talkative. I hope we will see each other again. I don’t see why not. Maybe I’ll move to the Midwest.”

  Jeremy asked whether, if they made a movie from my book, he could sell his movie rights and get some cash. I told him I doubted that anyone would make a movie, so he shouldn’t count on anything. “Yeah, it needs conflict,” he said, then added jokingly, “Where’s the conflict? I guess I could kidnap Darian for two weeks or something and ask for a million-dollar ransom.”

  The kids returned, and we ran races around the lifeguard shack. Tom refereed wrestling matches between his two “sisters”—as he was now calling Mimi and Stacy. He buried them in the sand, then dug them up. He grabbed them by the wrists and spun them around like helicopter blades. Jeremy suggested we go visit another one of his children, who lived not far away. Tom nixed the idea: this was family enough for him today. Jeremy marched around with Darian, singing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

  It was dinnertime, and we had to start heading toward the airport. Tom stopped at a gift shop to buy presents for all of us: candles for Stacy and Mimi, a Rastafarian hat for me, and—because he had seen how much Jeremy liked Indians—a picture of a tribal chief in a feathered headdress for Jeremy. We found a pizza parlor. Darian sat on Jeremy’s lap and banged the table. “He’s a drummer, I knew it!” Jeremy exclaimed. Jeremy showed off the baby to the cooks and other diners. He was calling himself “Grandpa” without any hesitation.

  Jeremy and the girls drove with us to the airport and decided to wait until we boarded our flights. On the shuttle from the rental car lot, Tom whispered to me, “I am really, really, really happy.” He and Lana held hands and nuzzled. Tom and Jeremy made plans for Jeremy and the girls to come visit Kansas City soon, probably before Thanksgiving. We sat in a circle on the floor of the airport terminal and played cards. Tom called his mom. They talked for a few minutes. Then Tom handed the phone to Jeremy. The first thing Jeremy said was, “Hi, this is Tom’s dad.” Then he added, “Thanks for letting Tom come out to see us.” Jeremy listened a little and gave the phone back. Tom then passed the phone off to Stacy, who said a few words. (Later, Mary recounted her end of the conversation. She was annoyed: Mary had told Tom, “Here, talk to your sister,” and passed her phone to Jessica. Tom had heard “sister,” and given his phone to Stacy. Mary said, “Jessica was so hurt when I gave the phone to her and it turned out that he had done that, since Jessica is his sister, not the strangers he is so quick to refer to as ‘sisters.’ ”)

  My flight left first, so I hugged everyone good-bye. As I waited in the security line, I gazed back at them. They were playing cards. What were they, I thought, if not a family, even an all-American family? There was Tom, who was too adult for his eighteen years; Tom’s childlike father, Jeremy, the careless “genius” sperm donor; Tom’s immigrant wife, Lana; Tom’s half sisters Stacy and Mimi, merrily oblivious to the paternal abandonment that might await them; and, asleep in his car seat, Tom’s own son, Darian, the heir to Nobel sperm bank genes, which is to say, the heir to God knows what.

  CHAPTER 13

  SPERMICIDE

  The Nobel sperm bank celebrity grows up: Doron Blake, age seventeen. Dave Luchansky/ Getty Images

  One question still puzzled me: Why had the Repository for Germinal Choice closed in 1999? I couldn’t figure it out. Robert Graham had considered the sperm bank the most important work of his life, and he had intended it to survive him. Yet two years after his death in 1997, the bank was finished. Surely Graham hadn’t simply abandoned it. What had happened?

  I finally learned the whole story from Anita Neff, the Repository’s final manager. Anita had been a shadowy presence throughout my research. Lots of the donors I met had been recruited by her. She had played the heavy in the Donor White saga, cutting the communication between Beth and Roger in 1997. But no one knew what had become of her. One donor thought she had moved to Italy. Another said she was in Norway. For two years, I hunted her unsuccessfully. Then, in 2003, the documentary researcher Derek Anderson found Anita in southern California. After several years overseas, she had settled just a few miles from the Repository’s old office in Escondido. After some cordial e-mails, Anita agreed to meet me on my next trip out west.

  We made a date for brunch at a Del Mar mall. There was no one who looked remotely like a former sperm bank manager at our meeting point. Finally a woman approached me and said, “I’m Anita. Are you David?” Anita was stunning. She was wearing a black skirt, slit to reveal all but a few northern inches of her excellent legs, black lace stockings, a tight black top with a fur collar and fur wristbands, and an elegant, wide-brimmed black hat. She was forty-five years old, but she looked thirty. (When I saw her, I understood why donors had spoken of her with such, um, reverence. One had remembered with evident delight how “she was motivation when I was doing my donations, if you know what I mean.” Not surprisingly, she had been a superb recruiter.)

  Anita had not spoken publicly about the Repository since she had left it, but she was glad to have the chance to talk. She was direct and funny. One reason I particularly liked her was that she was not a eugenics zealot, unlike others who had worked for Graham. Quite the contrary. Anita was the ninth of eleven children, and she didn’t have any kids herself; she did not spend her days fretting about the shortage of children in the world. She said she had ended up at the Repository by chance. In 1993, when she was an HIV and pregnancy counselor, she had answered a classified ad for the Repository.

  She had never heard of the sperm bank, but Graham had charmed her during the interview. Anita didn’t care about Graham’s genetic crusade, but she didn’t see anything wrong with the bank’s mission, either. And she was really excited about the challenge of repairing the bank. When she arrived in 1993, the vaunted Nobel Prize sperm bank was a mess. Under a series of managers in the 1980s and early 1990s—none of them technicians or scientists—the bank had slid into a sorry decline. It had managed to spawn a lot of kids, but its methods were haphazard, to put it mildly. Graham, for example, had shamefully loosened his standards for donors. Graham had begun with the intention of recruiting only the best men in the world. But by the mid-1980s, despite occasional catches such as Donor White and Donor Fuchsia, he and his managers were accepting almost any man who walked in the door. A series of volunteer donors, moderately accomplished egotists such as Jeremy, had snowed Graham. They had sold him on their brilliance, sometimes lying to him about their IQ, athletic achievements, musical talents, and professional achievements (lies that were then repeated in the donor catalogs). Forget about Nobel laureates; the Nobel sperm bank was taking men you wouldn’t wish on your ex-girlfriend. (Graham had more quixotic ambitions, too: he tried to enlist Prince Philip of England as a donor, despite the absence of evidence that the prince has ever engaged in any kind of cognitive activity. And according to Sylvia Nasr’s A Beautiful Mind, schizophrenic mathematician John Forbes Nash also considered donating his genius sperm, though I found no evidence that Graham had contacted him.)

  It seemed to me that the Nobel sperm bank ultimately became a kind of scam. Its reputation for Nobelists and geniuses fooled mothers into thinking they were getting a better product than they were. They expected Nobelists, and ended up with men like Jeremy. But the decline in quality was invisible to customers. The catalogs remained grandiose, duping women into thinking that the donors of 1988 were the same kind of men as the Nobel donors of 1980.

  The Repository had other dubious practices. Most sperm banks limited themselves to donors under forty, because older men’s sperm suffer from more genetic abnormalities. Not the Repository. Donor White, for example, was over fifty when he was recruited and nearly sixty when he stopped giving. Graham also played loose with child limits. He originally restricted donors to twenty o
ffspring, to reduce the possibility of accidental incest. But when Graham found himself short of semen—a regular problem—he relied repeatedly on his most prolific donors. One donor fathered twenty-five kids, according to Anita. I suspect gold medalist Donor Fuchsia fathered even more than that. (Why? Because of the thirty kids I know, eight are from Fuchsia. That’s 27 percent of them. My sample could be statistically anomalous. If it’s not, that suggests that more than fifty of the bank’s two-hundred-odd kids came from Donor Fuchsia.)

  Anita said she had whipped the Repository into shape. She had insisted that it follow the American Association of Tissue Banks’ guidelines for sperm banks. That meant declining donors who were over forty or had fathered too many children. She tightened the application process. She added new blood tests and disease screenings. She flew donors to San Diego for a brutal physical. Before Anita, few prospective donors had been rejected on health grounds. Under Anita, that happened all the time. Because donors did their business at home, she DNA-tested all sperm samples to make sure they were sending their own seed. Anita brought truth in advertising to the Repository. The catalogs were toned down; donors’ accomplishments were not exaggerated. If a donor had scored only 420 on the verbal section of his GREs, his listing said so. Anita reorganized the records after discovering to her horror that the bank had reused color identification codes (two Donor Oranges!). Anita also cracked down on the ad hoc arrangements some donors had struck with previous managers. One donor, for example, intended to pay for his offspring’s college educations. Anita said no. “That was making the bank play a role it was not supposed to play. It was causing people to choose their donor based on the hope of getting something out of him. That was not what Dr. Graham wanted.”

  Anita and Graham shared recruiting duties. Anita pursued different kinds of men than her boss did. Graham still hungered after great brains, even if he couldn’t find them. Anita prioritized health over genius, making sure every man she found had a stellar medical history. And she broadened the donor pool. Graham let her “recruit highly qualified people that he would never have recruited.” In other words, nonwhite people. She enlisted a Samoan and a Native American. (Anita thought Graham was not quite the racist he was made out to be. “He was willing to be convinced that the world was full of good people of high capacity, and they don’t all have to be German. He was willing not to always hold on to the past.”)

  The Repository sustained its popularity during the early and mid-1990s. The waiting list reached eighteen months, because there were never enough donors. Usually, Anita could supply only fifteen women at a time with sperm. California Cryobank, by contrast, could supply hundreds of customers at once. Demand at the Repository remained strong even when Graham started charging for sperm. In the mid-1990s, the bank collected a $3,500 flat fee per client, a lot more than other banks. Ever the economic rationalist, Graham had concluded that customers would value his product more if they had to pay for it.

  The press remained enthralled with the Nobel sperm bank, in a delighted and revolted way. When William Shockley died of prostate cancer in 1989—scorned, loathed, and bitter—his obituaries noted, contemptuously, that he had been the Nobel Prize sperm bank’s flagship donor. In 1991, the Annals of Improbable Research awarded Graham its first Ig Nobel Prize in Biology. Even so, newspaper and TV reporters streamed to Escondido to interview Graham and Anita. They clamored to know whether the dream had come true. Were the kids special? Were they “wonder kids,” “designer babies,” “superchildren”?

  Graham didn’t know the answer. He had intended to use his Repository kids as lab rats in scientific studies of their abilities, but that plan, like all his others, had not turned out as he hoped. In 1992, he had mailed an initial survey to all the parents, asking for basic information: How old were their children? How well were they doing compared to other kids? Any IQ test results yet? Practically no one had returned the survey. The parents had rarely shared Graham’s eugenics bent to start with, and they cared even less once their babies were born. Graham was disappointed that he would never prove that his sperm had produced better children.

  Graham was eighty-six by the time Anita met him but still spry. A bout with cancer slowed him down a little and he wore hearing aids, but he was otherwise the same polite, energetic, flirty man he had been thirty years earlier. He would swim at his pool in the morning, then visit the Repository for an hour in the afternoon. He showed off to Anita—in a cute way, she thought. He was writing his memoir, and he wanted to include lots of pictures of himself as a young man, including several in scanty bathing suits, because “he was so proud of his physique.” Graham loved being around pretty women, but he was gentlemanly, not lecherous. He liked to call Anita “my Varga Girl.” (One donor recalled that when the eighty-eight-year-old Graham had come to recruit him, he had asked Graham if his wife, Marta, missed him while he was away. Graham had looked slyly at the donor, proudly hitched up his pants, and proclaimed, “Well, I took care of that before I came out here.”)

  In the 1990s, Graham accumulated lifetime achievement awards from ophthalmologic and optometric societies. He accepted the prizes graciously—he was incapable of doing anything ungraciously—but they meant nothing to him. He was still a crusader for his real cause, Anita said. “When he was probably ninety, he was getting a big award from an ophthalmology association, and I asked him how he felt about it. He said, ‘I really don’t care. That’s the past. I care about the future, about what I am going to do in the next ten years.’ ”

  Even in his late eighties, Graham was leafing through Who’s Who looking for donors, sponsoring a conference on human genetic engineering at UCLA, eagerly granting TV interviews about the Repository, happily trekking cross-country to flatter men one third his age into becoming donors.

  Graham was desperate for the Repository to continue after his death, Anita said, but he had a problem: none of his children was interested in it. In fact, they hated it. Who could blame them? Graham sometimes seemed prouder of his sperm bank offspring than of some of his own children. Graham’s wife had no particular fondness for the bank, either, Anita said. She tolerated it because she loved her husband.

  Meanwhile, the Repository was bleeding cash. Graham had hoped that customer fees would enable the bank to break even. But the fees were never remotely enough. According to its tax returns, the Repository spent about $170,000 a year to collect and distribute sperm but garnered only $20,000 from customer fees, $40,000 in a good year. The difference had to come from somewhere: namely, Graham’s pocket. He shelled out $100,000 or more every year to keep the bank, going. As long as he lived, that was fine—he had millions to spare. But what about when he died?

  In 1994, Graham thought he had found the perfect solution: an Ohio magnate named Floyd Kimble. A World War II veteran, Kimble had settled in eastern Ohio after the war and thrived in all kinds of businesses. He drilled gas wells; mined limestone, coal, and clay; operated a landfill; manufactured cement mixers; farmed; and more. He succeeded at everything. His biggest score came in 1988, when he won a $600 million lawsuit over natural gas contracts. It’s not clear how much of that he was actually paid, but the next year, he and his wife, Doris, set aside $30 million to start the Foundation for the Continuity of Man. The name was a conscious echo of Robert Graham’s Foundation for the Advancement of Man.

  Kimble was a Graham acolyte, but he was cruder in every way than Graham. Kimble’s manner was rougher; his eugenic ideas were less sophisticated; his prejudice was more overt. Still, the two men had plenty in common: they were self-made millionaires from rural backgrounds, and they shared a can-do spirit and the conviction that our genes were going to hell.

  Kimble had slightly different goals than Graham. His ideas were a queer stew of Graham’s eugenic alarmism and his own apocalyptic environmentalism. As a farmer, Kimble believed that hybridization was weakening plants even though it increased crop yields. Kimble theorized that hybridization had weakened humanity in the same way: Too many unfit h
umans were being born, and they were breeding too much. Kimble also dreaded a global environmental catastrophe. His solution to all this: rather than distributing great sperm à la Graham, Kimble decided he would preserve it for the future in a remote, radiation-proof vault. Hence, the Foundation for the Continuity of Man. In 1991, Kimble bought a real bank building in suitably far-flung Spokane, Washington, and set about stocking the vault with human semen. He also planned a separate warehouse for plant seeds and animal semen.

  Kimble contacted Graham to discuss the genetic crisis and the Repository, and they struck up a friendship. Through his connection with Graham, Kimble met the former Repository manager Dora Vaux and hired her to run his bank. Vaux solicited Repository donors to contribute to Kimble’s storage bank as well. (Michael the Nobelist’s son says he gave to both banks.) Kimble also invited fifty-six members of the Norwegian Olympic team to donate, though none did. For Kimble, Norwegian Olympians were as good as it got. In 1996, Vaux told a reporter that “racial purity” was a goal of Kimble’s bank, that she was collecting only from “high-achieving white men.” Vaux also said that if sperm from black men were ever collected, it would be stored separately from the white sperm.

  Graham realized that Kimble could ensure the future of the Nobel sperm bank. He was the perfect heir to it. He was twenty years younger than Graham, he had plenty of money, and he believed in genius sperm banking. Kimble was certainly a better bet than Graham’s own family, which would shut the bank the first chance they got. According to Anita, Graham and Kimble struck a handshake deal. Kimble replaced Graham as the cash cow and agreed to continue the Repository when Graham died. During the last week of 1994, Kimble donated $400,000 to Graham’s foundation, enough to run the Repository for three years. When that money ran out, Kimble supplied another $100,000.