The Genius Factory (22 page)

Hi my name is K—. I have blond hair and blue eyes. I’m looking for my father. He has blonde hair, green eyes and he is 5′9".

There have been more than six hundred matches on the DSR so far. Most of these involve very young half siblings who are being connected by their parents. There are very few cases of children and donors finding each other, in part because so few donors have posted on the site. (Donor White is one of those who has posted.) For most American sperm donors, donating was something they did when they were quite young in order to make money. Most didn’t spend a lot of time pondering the consequences of their action, because they didn’t think there would be any. They counted on anonymity to shield them forever.

As anonymity crumbles in Europe and on the Internet, the sperm bank industry, now all too responsive to consumer sentiment, is being caught in a squeeze: it wants to deliver the openness its customers want, but it fears that the quality and quantity of donors will plummet if banks accept only men who are willing to be identified. In the Netherlands, for example, the supply of donors has dried up since donor anonymity was abolished. The American industry must choose between conflicting notions of consumer choice: the desire for a
known
donor versus the desire for the
best
donor. Customers, of course, expect both: incredible donors who are willing to be identified.

The consumer revolution in sperm banking has one more dark side that banks and families don’t like to discuss. Once you start thinking of sperm as just another product, you start treating it like just another product. As long as customers consider AID to be a form of shopping, some of them will inevitably be disappointed. In America, the customer is always right. A customer who is unhappy with a DVD player can replace it. What about a customer who is unhappy with a child? Shopping for sperm looks like any other kind of commerce. There are products, marketing, competition. It’s tempting to think that with enough knowledge, you will get exactly the child you want, as you can buy exactly the car you want. But sperm banks do make mistakes. They sometimes send out the wrong sperm. Sometimes they miss something dire in a donor’s medical history.

More important, there is serendipity in DNA. A great donor can pass on a lousy set of genes. A recessive illness may be hiding somewhere, or just mediocrity. Women shop carefully for sperm in hopes of certainty. But there is no certainty in a baby. It does not come with a ten-year warranty. In sperm shopping, there is a deposit, but there are no returns, no refunds, no exchanges.

CHAPTER 10

WHO IS THE REAL DONOR CORAL?

Donor Coral’s entry in the 1985 Repository for Germinal Choice catalog.

A
few weeks after Samantha Grant mailed her letter to the plastic surgeon Jeremy Taft, suggesting that he was Donor Coral, Dr. Taft sent her a reply. It was not what Samantha had expected. Taft denied that he was Alton’s father, denied that he was Donor Coral, and denied, in fact, that he had ever donated sperm. Samantha was baffled and irritated. She wondered if he was lying. After all, she had first approached him more than a year earlier: If he wasn’t Donor Coral, why had it taken him so long to deny it? And she noticed that he didn’t sign the rejection letter? Why was that? (I suggested that he could be afraid that she had a sample of Donor Coral’s handwriting to compare it to.) She reviewed all her evidence and was again struck by the coincidences. The similarities were so numerous: after matching age, personality, marital status, number and ages of children, hair and eye color, profession, geographic history, and hobbies, Samantha said, “you get down to a sample of one.”

Half kidding, she mused about hiring a private detective to investigate Jeremy Taft and thought about how to obtain one of his fingernail clippings so she could DNA-test it. But then she allowed her disappointment to settle and disperse. She slowly let go of Jeremy Taft—not because she doubted he was Coral but because there was nothing to do about it. “I shall not bother him again,” she told me—her formality made it sound definitive. If Jeremy Taft wasn’t Coral, bothering him was pointless. And even if he
was
Coral, it was still pointless, because he clearly didn’t want to meet his son.

This was in late 2002. Samantha and I rarely talked during the first few months of 2003. Then I made an unexpected discovery. There was one person who knew the identity of Donor Coral for sure: Julianna McKillop, who had managed the Repository in the mid-1980s and had accidentally given away Coral’s first name when Samantha had visited the bank in 1985. When Samantha had started her hunt for Coral, she had tried and failed to locate Julianna, figuring that Julianna might be willing to call Coral for her. I, too, had searched for Julianna a little bit in 2001. But the letter I had sent her had been returned, and the phone number I had for her had been disconnected. I stopped looking for her; later, another donor told me she had died.

In 2002 and 2003, I was helping a Canadian documentary company make a film about the Nobel sperm bank. In spring 2003, the film’s researcher, Derek Anderson, started looking for Julianna in the hope that she could find another donor Derek was looking for. Derek traced Julianna’s movements—from the old address in California that I had for her to Europe and back again—and finally found her. She was very much alive, and living in San Francisco.

Derek gave me her phone number, and I called her. Julianna was delighted to be found. The Repository was the greatest adventure of her life, and she loved talking about it. We chatted for a bit about Robert Graham. Then, before I even mentioned why I was calling, she asked if I knew Donor Coral. He had been her favorite donor, she said. She had lost track of him when she’d left the Repository. She had always wondered what happened to him. “Oh, he was
wonderful.
I
loved
him. He was such a lovely man. Do you know what he’s doing now? I’d love to see him again. We were
so
close. We were such great friends.”

I said I was looking for Coral, too. A cat-and-mouse game ensued. She didn’t want to reveal a confidence, so she wanted to make sure I wasn’t lying to weasel information out of her. To convince her of my good intentions, I told her about Samantha and Alton, and Samantha’s avid search. Julianna remembered Samantha, she was excited to aid Samantha’s quest. Julianna asked me if I knew Coral’s name. I said it was Jeremy, and that he was a doctor in Florida. That mollified her. She realized I was telling the truth. She asked if I knew Coral’s last name. It was Taft, I said.

For a moment there was silence at her end of the line. She was considering whether to tell me the truth. Then she exclaimed, “That’s not it!”

“It’s not?”

“No, it’s Jeremy
Sampson,
unless he changed it. Sampson is the name he always used with me. Yes, Jeremy Sampson, not Taft. Oh, how I would love to see him again. We must find him! How can we find him?”

Jeremy Sampson,
not
Jeremy Taft. The plastic surgeon hadn’t been lying; he had been the victim of a very unlikely series of coincidences.

Julianna said she had always thought of herself as a “middle mom” when she was at the Repository—the apex of a triangular family consisting of the birth mother, the donor, and herself. She relished the prospect of middlemoming again. We agreed to search together for Dr. Jeremy Sampson in hope of reuniting him with Samantha, his son Alton, and Julianna.

I arranged to see Julianna in San Francisco and met her one Saturday morning in her beautiful downtown apartment. She managed the building and lived there rent-free. One of Julianna’s many careers was as a painter, and she had decorated one wall of the dining room with a huge mural of her family. Practically every piece of furniture was painted in tempera—cheery, psychedelic patterns: I half expected her little dogs to be covered in swirls and paisley.

Julianna had gotten a raw deal from life but vigorously resisted self-pity: she had lost a daughter to cancer, one husband to a plane crash, another to illness. She was in her sixties, but carried herself with the energy of a younger woman; in the bathroom there was a recent photo of her skydiving. She had white hair and a too-deep tan, and a little Liz Taylor in her face. She reminded me, in fact, of a beloved, aging movie star, at once effusive and imperial.

I asked her how she had come to the Repository. “In 1981, I was a widow, I had just moved to La Jolla, and I went to a talk by [Graham’s assistant] Paul Smith at the Unitarian Church in Del Mar. Paul was running the Repository at the time. I heard him and I thought,
That is the most fabulous idea I have ever heard.
I asked if I could work for him, and he said, ‘Sure, I need someone to answer the phones.’ ” While Paul recruited donors and processed sperm, Julianna talked to the desperate customers who called asking for help.

Paul Smith and Julianna were a mismatched set. She thought he was slovenly and careless. His record keeping was not up to her standards, and he shed dog hair everywhere. (“I told Paul, ‘Imagine if anyone gets infected because they are inserting dog hair in their uterus!’ ”) In 1984, she said, she convinced Robert Graham to fire Smith. Unfortunately for the Repository, the donors, who had all been recruited by Paul, left with him.

Paul Smith remained a fervent devotee of genius sperm banking after Graham sacked him. He took the Repository donors and opened a rival sperm bank, Heredity Choice, which is still going today. Heredity Choice has fathered nearly three hundred kids, according to Paul, more than the Repository ever did.

Today, Paul runs Heredity Choice out of love (or obsession)—God knows there is no rational reason to do it. He and his delightful wife, Adonna, own ten acres in the California desert, way out in the Antelope Valley, where they breed border collies, Siberian huskies, and genius babies. They make a teeny bit of money from selling sperm and puppies. They spend it on dog food and collecting sperm.

When I met him in 2001, Paul was still recovering from an embarrassing setback. The last time he had let a reporter come to his home was in 1996, when a
Primetime Live
camera crew filmed him for a story about genius sperm banks. Paul kept his Heredity Choice samples in a trailer that had no running water. That was unsanitary enough. But Paul also showed the crew his liquid-nitrogen tanks, where he stored human sperm and dog sperm side by side. Paul didn’t understand why this was revolting. When ABC reporter Cynthia McFadden asked him about mingling the human and dog samples, Paul gave a funny, self-destructive answer: “The dog straws are twice as long [as the human ones]. I don’t think I have ever confused the two. And none of my clients has ever had puppies from the sperm I have supplied.”

California public health officials were understandably less jolly. They inspected Heredity Choice a few weeks after the camera crew’s visit and ordered Paul to shut down—the only time California had ever closed a sperm bank. Paul squabbled with them a little bit, then moved his storage tanks to Nevada, which didn’t regulate sperm banks.*
 
⁴

With Paul out of the way, Julianna convinced Graham to make her the manager instead. Julianna relished her new job. “I said, ‘I am going to collect sperm come hell or high water.’ ” She cruised southern California in a white Pontiac Grand Am, searching for candidates. “I went to Caltech, and I started knocking on doors. I would say, ‘I am Julianna, do you have fifteen minutes?’ and he would say, ‘Who are you?’ And I would say, ‘I am from the Repository for Germinal Choice. Have you heard of it?’ And he would say, ‘Come in and shut the door!’ ” When a donor accepted, Julianna would whip out a cup and tell him she’d return in forty-five minutes to collect it. When she got the sperm, she rushed it out to the car and, in the middle of the Caltech campus, mixed in the buffer and froze the vials.

Julianna shared Graham’s conviction that improving the gene pool was the most urgent job in the world. When FedEx spilled a Repository liquid-nitrogen tank, thawing and killing the sperm inside, Julianna built a special wooden stand to hold the tanks upright during shipment. “One drop of spilled sperm was like
gold
!”

Eventually, she went so far for the cause that it got her fired. When a particularly desperate client failed to conceive with frozen sperm, Julianna suggested that her then boyfriend—a successful surgeon—contribute fresh semen, since fresh was more potent than frozen. The surgeon wasn’t a donor of the Repository and hadn’t been vetted by Graham and his board. And this was also
after
HIV had been identified. Julianna had been dating the surgeon for two years, so she vouched for his clean blood. That didn’t protect her when Graham’s wife, Marta Ve, heard about the proposed freelancing. Julianna was fired, though she said she would do the same thing again: helping a needy woman conceive was more important than an academic concern about a donor she knew to be clean and healthy.

The story of her firing brought Julianna back to her favorite subject and mine: Donor Coral. Julianna said that she never gave the client fresh sperm from her boyfriend. Instead, she tried once more with frozen sperm. That time she used a Coral sample. It worked, because Coral never failed. “He always had so much sperm, and it was so active,” Julianna said. “And it is not just that there was so much of it, but they were all going in the right direction with one head and one tail. Jeremy’s were like a whole school of sardines!

“Oh, Jeremy was wonderful. When Jeremy came along, that made the bank. We had almost no donors then, but he came, and he was so great, and I knew: now we can really have a sperm bank.”

“How did you find him?” I asked.

He had volunteered, Julianna said. It was around 1984. “He read about it and he came to see us. I said, ‘Tell us about yourself.’ His answers were so wonderful.” Jeremy wasn’t a Nobelist. He was just a medical student, too young to have accomplished much. But he seemed just the kind of all-around stud that Graham craved—the type of man Graham’s clients were so smitten with. He said he had an IQ of 160. He was gifted at chess and mathematics. He was a superb athlete. He came from a celebrated family of scientists and musicians. He was great-looking and incredibly charming. And he had already fathered three beautiful kids. “It was all so cool,” said Julianna. The board quickly approved him as a donor.

Coral became the Repository’s star. Julianna urged applicants to select him. She did that not only because she had a plentiful supply of his seed—he was an avid donor—but also because she thought, “His genes should go all over the place.” Jeremy separated from his wife soon after he signed up for the bank, and Dr. Graham—keen to keep his prize stallion—told Julianna to make sure he was happy. She took him out to dinner on Graham’s dime and bought him bottles of wine. They struck up a great friendship. “He was such a freethinker, so creative, so caring. He reminded me of Dr. Graham, in fact.”

The Repository produced about sixty kids while she was there, she said, and half of them were Jeremy’s. She had no doubt that Jeremy would want to meet his sons Alton and Tom. “Jeremy would want to see the whole family get together. He is a family man. He would love that.”

I told Samantha about the discovery of Jeremy Sampson. She was overjoyed that the donor wasn’t the objectionable Jeremy Taft. In mid-June 2003, she and I began searching in earnest for Jeremy Sampson. Julianna left the hunt to us. Julianna couldn’t remember where Jeremy had worked or even where he had attended medical school. Still, we expected the search would be a cinch: How many Jeremy Sampsons had graduated from med school in California during the 1980s and then practiced in Florida? We examined Florida and California physician records, but there was no Jeremy, Jerry, Gerry, or Jeremiah Sampson. We found a Dr. Jeremiah Simpson, but he was way too old. I asked Julianna if she possibly misremembered the name. She doubted it, but we looked for other Jeremy Ss, anyway. I found a Jeremy Sanders who seemed promising, but Samantha saw a picture of him and knew it was the wrong guy. Samantha went to her local Mormon temple to check genealogy records. No Jeremy Sampson. She tried to cross-reference California’s marriage and physician records. No Jeremy Sampson.