The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  Tom had come to recognize that Jeremy, who had neglected most of his own kids, wasn’t capable of being his dad, either. “Before I left Florida, I said to myself, ‘Tom, be honest with yourself, he is not going to be a father.’ And he shouldn’t be. That is not what he signed up to do. I am hoping we can have a close friendship, but that is the most it will ever be. And now, if I have a problem, I can’t see going to him to talk about it. He doesn’t feel like family, at least not yet. Really, I am lucky even to have met him, so I shouldn’t expect anything like that.”

  Since meeting Jeremy, Tom had stopped talking about a subject that had used to fascinate him: genetic potential. In the beginning, Tom had been mesmerized by his genetic heritage, and destiny: Jonas Salk, my dad? After Mary had told him he was a Nobel sperm baby, Tom had started to believe in DNA, to hope that his fate was in his genes. But now he had discovered that his genetic benefactor wasn’t a Nobelist, wasn’t a genius, wasn’t even an admirable man. Having accepted the DNA religion, he was ready to abandon it. When he had started searching for his Nobel sperm donor dad, Tom had hoped that genes were destiny. Since he had found Jeremy, he had hoped they were not.

  Through 2004, Jeremy slipped further and further into the background of Tom’s manic life. Baby, wife, mom, job, school: Tom had to deal with all of them; all of them were exhausting. During the winter, Tom’s relationship with his mom fell apart. They had been sniping at each other for months, partly because Tom disliked her new boyfriend. When Mary and the boyfriend got engaged, Tom and his mom stopped talking. Tom and Lana were still living in Mary’s basement, but he started making plans to move out as soon as he could save enough for a security deposit.

  Meanwhile, the rest of Tom’s life settled into a kind of order. He was impossibly busy, but he was not unhappy. He was on the verge of completing his two-year degree and was planning what to study for his B.A.—maybe computer science. Lana was going to start classes in massage therapy, and she was also moving steadily toward her green card. In the spring, Tom and Lana decided to celebrate the wedding they had never had when they’d gotten married—a joyous, drunken Russian blowout at Lana’s parents’ house. They planned it for May, and Tom invited Jeremy. Jeremy said he would come, but of course he didn’t. Tom enjoyed himself so much at the party that he didn’t really care that his “real dad” was missing.

  Oddly, Tom found himself getting closer and closer to his old dad, Alvin. Seldom happy at the best of times, Alvin had been in a funk since his divorce from Mary. Sadness had replaced his usual simmering anger. He sought Tom’s comfort, and Tom was glad to give it; it was the first warm emotional exchange they had had in years. When his dad came home from the road, he slept on Tom and Lana’s couch. He even paid a little attention to Darian.

  It puzzled Tom that his relationship with his mother and Jeremy—his biological parents—would fail while he loved his dad and Lana more and more. He e-mailed me recently, “I know my dad isn’t really my dad, yet I’m a hundred times closer with him than I am with Jeremy. I know my mom really is my mom and I have a blood relation to her, and yet I am much closer to my dad right now despite the lack of biological relation. And I am closer to Lana than I am with anyone else and I am not related to her in any way shape or form. In the end I don’t think that your family matters that much in the sense of who they are. I think it matters who—in and out of your family—you embrace and accept as your family.”

  Tom reached out for one more embrace. He had not talked to his half brother Alton Grant for more than a year. But in late summer of 2004, Tom e-mailed Alton again. Alton quickly replied, and they started trading messages. They talked about music, their families, school. It made Tom happy to connect with his brother again. Alton mentioned to Tom that he had refused to meet Jeremy when Jeremy had shown up at his house. Tom, who is usually shy of giving advice, told me he couldn’t help it this time. He told Alton about how his own relationship with Jeremy had soured, but then he suggested that Alton see Jeremy anyway. Just in case, Tom urged, you should meet your father. Just in case.

  One night in 2003, at around eleven P.M., I got a call at home from a young woman. She said her name was Tatiana. She sounded as if she was about to cry, and then she did. I had posted my number and e-mail address on various sperm bank bulletin boards, mentioning my interest in connecting kids and donors from the Repository for Germinal Choice. I had been swamped with plaintive calls and e-mails, but only a few from people who had used the Repository. Most had used other banks and clinics. They tried me because they couldn’t try anyone else. Tatiana was one of those callers.

  She told me she had a two-year-old daughter through Fairfax Cryobank. “What I did was wrong! I should never have had this child. I was twenty-two. I just wanted it. I needed a child. The force of nature or something. I needed it. I don’t know why. So I went to the cryobank, and I picked a donor. It was a mistake. As soon as I got pregnant from the sperm donor, I had nightmares. Who is that inside? Who is it? I could not bond with the baby inside. It was inside.”

  Now, Tatiana said, she had to find the donor, and that was why she was calling me. “I have been looking for him for a year. I have narrowed it to sixty names, because the bank told me the name of the medical school he went to, even the year he graduated. I have ordered the yearbook. Now you have to help me find him.” Tatiana insisted to me that finding the donor would solve her problems, that it would help her bond to her daughter. I tried to dissuade her from searching. I argued that knowing the donor’s name or even shaking his hand wouldn’t make her daughter more her daughter. And it also wouldn’t make her daughter more his daughter.

  The more time I spent around DI parents and kids, the more I got the sense of how deep and how widespread the yearning of people like Tatiana was. They hungered both for the truth and for family. Around one million American kids are “donor offspring.” Most of them don’t know it, but more and more of them do, because the walls of silence around AID are collapsing. Single women and lesbians are pushing for openness, and so are married couples who have used DI. Eventually, sperm donor anonymity will end in the United States, as it is ending in Europe. Anonymity will end for the same reason adoption records are being unsealed. The laws that protected adoption and sperm bank records were drafted in a pre-DNA era. But the past thirty years have witnessed an explosion of knowledge about DNA, from the Human Genome Project to gene therapy to preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Increasingly we accept that our genes guide us and even rule us. That triumph of geneism has enormous implications for AID and adoption: once you decide that you are defined by your genes, it implies a right to know your genetic history.

  But I’m not sure we are ready for the end of anonymity yet. In my journeys with the families, children, and donors of the Nobel sperm bank, I came to believe that even if there’s a moral (and perhaps one day, legal) right to know a sperm donor father, that won’t necessarily create happiness or psychological closure—or a family. A sperm donor, after all, is a particularly unpromising candidate for a relationship with his child. Adopted children know that at least something—an event as transient as a one-night stand or as durable as a marriage—happened between their birth parents. And they know that their mother carried them for nine months, gave birth to them, and held them for at least a moment, and probably much more. But a sperm donor offers no such consolation. There is no bond, no physical connection between father and child. Tom once told me he wanted to know what Jeremy had been thinking when he donated. What was Jeremy thinking when he “conceived” Tom? Probably about the breasts on the model in the Playboy he was thumbing. Today, there is so much expectation about these sperm donors, so much hope that they will turn out to be donor “dads.” Yet their only connection to their “children” is that once upon a time, maybe on a grubby couch, they masturbated into a sterile plastic cup. Fatherhood is not what they signed up for; it’s not what they want; it’s probably not anything they would be good at. Sometimes, faced with donors like Jeremy or Micha
el the Nobelist’s son, I wondered if it would be easier if we regarded donors as mere equipment, rather than dreamed about them as fathers.

  But then I thought about Donor White. It was more than two years after Roger had first written to me. The gloom that had settled on his life during his illness had totally lifted. He was e-mailing with Joy a couple of times a week and still found her “highly pleasing.” Beth always sent Roger a copy of Joy’s report card, knowing that no one would be prouder of it than he. For Father’s Day 2003, the anniversary of Beth’s initial e-mail to Roger, Joy gave Roger the needlepoint sampler she had been working on when I had seen her months earlier. The sampler was a poem, the first letter of each line decorated with red roses:

  The kiss of the sun for pardon

  The song of the birds for mirth

  One is nearer God’s heart in a garden

  Than anywhere else on earth

  Joy Lily, June 15, 2003

  A card accompanied the sampler: “I hope you like your present because every stitch was made with happy thoughts of you. Lots of love, Joy.”

  “Needless to say,” Roger told me, “it is one of my most prized possessions.”

  Father’s Day 2004 brought an even better gift: Joy and Beth visited Roger again, and Joy’s stepdad even came along. And Roger made his own trip to her, his first travel since his illness. He and Rebecca flew to Pennsylvania to see Joy and tour Civil War battlefields. Roger also dreamed of taking Joy with him on a visit to Virginia, so they could see where their colonial ancestors had settled more than three hundred years before.

  Roger had undertaken an ambitious renovation project, too. His house had been falling apart for years, and once he had gotten sick, he had assumed he would never do anything about it: Why bother? But Joy had been talking about studying marine biology. The Scripps Oceanography Institute was just a few miles from Roger and Rebecca’s house; they got it into their heads that Joy might enroll there someday. So they added a second floor to the house, including a study for Joy. They included an extra bedroom, too: maybe she could live with them.

  Not long ago, Roger wrote me that the more he came to know Joy, the less he thought about his scientific achievements—the piles of articles and patents that had consumed his life. “When I first had my health problems and knew nothing of Joy, I felt like I would be leaving nothing behind and that my life had been devoted largely to work that had amounted to very little. Now I feel that there will be something worthwhile left behind, and that thought is a comfort to me. . . . She will serve as my continuation into the future after my days on this earth are done.”

  I noticed something else, too. The more Roger came to know Joy, the less he cared about his own intelligence and the less he cared about hers. He rarely mentioned the Repository to me anymore. He hadn’t forgotten it, but he had set it aside. Dr. Graham’s grand, strange experiment, the fact that Roger belonged to an elite cadre of donors, the fact that Joy had been designed for greatness—these no longer interested him. There was no more experiment, only a child. Whether she was a genius, whether she could change the world—who cared? She was happy, and she was his. That was all that mattered.

  Endnotes

  * 1 Graham took credit for the magazine’s name. At the time it launched, he was facetiously addressing his letters to “Arnold Gingrich, Esquire.” When Gingrich was brainstorming a name for the magazine, one of Graham’s letters arrived, and Esquire was born.

  * 2 From the beginning, sperm banking had a comic aspect to it. In July 1976, a prankster named Joey Skaggs announced that he would be auctioning rock star sperm from his “Celebrity Sperm Bank” in Greenwich Village. “We’ll have sperm from the likes of Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and vintage sperm from Jimi Hendrix,” he declared. On the morning of the auction, Skaggs and his lawyer appeared to announce that the sperm had been kidnapped. They read a ransom note: “Caught you with your pants down. A sperm in the hand is worth a million in a Swiss bank. And that’s what it will cost you. More to cum. [signed] Abbie.” Hundreds of women called the nonexistent sperm bank asking if they could buy; radio and TV shows reported the aborted auction without realizing it had been a joke. And at the end of the year, Gloria Steinem—presumably unaware that it had been a hoax—appeared on an NBC special to give the Celebrity Sperm Bank an award for bad taste.

  * 3 At home, even a careful donor could run into unexpected difficulties, as Donor Orange did. The Repository instructed home donors to first place samples in their freezer, to cool them down slowly, and transfer them to liquid nitrogen only later, after that pre-icing. Said Donor Orange:

  “I was moving from one apartment to another down the hall, and I was in the middle of processing specimens. They were in the freezer of my old apartment. I wanted to make sure the electricity was hooked up in the new apartment so that the freezer would be working when I transferred the samples. I called the power company, and I didn’t want to explain too much, so I told them that I had ‘human specimens’ in my freezer and wanted to make sure they were not damaged when I moved. The power company lady seemed taken aback, but she was very nice and confirmed that the power was on. I hung up.

  “Ten minutes later the police were at my door. The officer wanted to come in and check the freezer to see that I didn’t have body parts in it. I explained that the ‘human specimens’ were sperm donations. It was very embarrassing.”

  * 4 The first time I interviewed Paul, he asked me if I could put him in touch with Bill Gates, since Slate was owned by Microsoft. Paul said he wanted to recruit Gates as a sperm donor—“even though I hate his operating system.” I laughed him off. The second time I saw Paul, we were saying good-bye, and his wife, Adonna, asked, “If I send you a donor application, would you fill it out?”

  “No, my wife wouldn’t want that,” I answered.

  “C’mon, you’ll think about it,” urged Adonna.

  “Okay, I’ll think about it,” I said.

  As I drove away, my first thought was, That is the most flattering thing anyone has ever said to me. I am genius sperm bank material. I knew I would never do it, but how gratifying to be asked. But my second thought was: That is just sad. From Bill Gates to me—the perfect arc of decline.

  Adonna, incidentally, never sent me the application.

  * 5 Here is imprinting as an anecdote: The dancer Isadora Duncan once suggested to George Bernard Shaw that they should have a child. “Think of it!” Duncan said. “With my body and your brains, what a wonder it would be.” Shaw replied, “But what if it had my body and your brains?”

  * 6 Well, maybe not too crude for everyone. A British production company recently announced plans for a reality TV show tentatively titled Make Me a Mum, in which one thousand men will compete to become the sperm donor to a first-time mother by showing off their intelligence, good looks, and health.

  * 7 Charging for interviews is not an unreasonable position: Doron sees no reason to waste his life as an unpaid sideshow freak. He wants something for his inconvenience, for having to answer the same tedious questions: So, are you a genius? Foreign reporters give him cash without hesitation. American journalists arrange byzantine schemes to avoid paying him directly. For example, 60 Minutes repeatedly flew Doron’s mother from Los Angeles to visit him at boarding school in New Hampshire, housing her at top-notch hotels. Some journalists have “rented” Afton’s house in order to obtain an interview or booked her for one of her psychotherapy sessions. Other media outlets don’t disclose that they’ve done this.

  I managed to get Afton to talk to me by taking her out to a nice dinner in Pasadena. Doron was more complicated. When I reached him in 2001, he asked for cash. I refused, but, at my Slate editor’s suggestion, I proposed that the magazine fly him to the East Coast so that he could visit his best friend in New Hampshire and I could meet him. That way he would get a benefit he wanted, a plane ticket worth several hundred dollars, and I could feel as if I were not buying him off. My convoluted ethical justification: I
would have had to fly cross-country to see him, so what difference did it make if the airplane fare went to me or him?

  He agreed, but it turned out he couldn’t fly east until months after I needed to talk to him. So I interviewed him over the phone for a long time and made plans to meet him at the airport for a follow-up when he finally came east. But because his schedule changed, I never did meet him face-to-face.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The children, parents, and donors of the Repository for Germinal Choice took a risk by sharing their secrets with me. I can’t thank them enough. The Genius Factory wouldn’t exist without them. I wish I could name them, but pseudonyms will have to do. Thank you Tom and Mary Legare, Samantha and Alton Grant, Jeremy Sampson, Donor White, Beth, and Joy. I was amazed at the grace with which you handled events that were sometimes joyful, often awkward, and always complicated.

  I owe my colleagues at Slate big time. Michael Kinsley pushed me to investigate the Nobel sperm bank, and Jacob Weisberg, his successor as Slate’s editor, encouraged me to persist with the project. Jack Shafer came up with the inspired idea of using the Internet to let children and donors find me. June Thomas thought up a great name for my series, “Seed.” Practically everyone else at Slate contributed valuable leads, suggestions, and corrections for the project.