The Genius Factory (28 page)

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.

Despite Kimble’s cash, Graham still got to supervise the Repository, and he had every intention of doing that for years. In June 1996, he celebrated his ninetieth birthday. In February 1997, Graham traveled by himself to Seattle for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “He was on a recruiting trip, of course,” said Anita. “He would go to meetings like that to walk the halls,” scouting for good-looking young hotshots. On February 13, Graham fell in the hotel bathtub, hit his head, and drowned. His
New York Times
obituary gave equal billing to his invention of shatterproof eyeglasses and his Nobel sperm bank.
Time
magazine marked his death with an item in its “Milestones” section. (A couple of items below, “Milestones” also noted that week’s conviction of biologist Carleton Gajdusek for child molestation. Gajdusek was a Nobel Prize winner. I wonder if Graham had ever asked Gajdusek to donate his Nobel sperm. What would he have made of Gajdusek’s crime? Would he still have coveted Gajdusek’s Nobel seed?)

About three hundred people attended Graham’s funeral at Emmanuel Faith Community Church in Escondido. Soon after, Anita mailed a letter to the donors announcing Graham’s passing. “We wanted to send you this personal note since you are a very special part of his dream. As per Dr. Graham’s wishes we will continue to operate the Repository in the same manner as in the past.”

But of course it wasn’t the same. Graham’s will didn’t mention the bank, but Floyd Kimble, as expected, assumed responsibility for it. He provided cash when Anita needed it. But after a slow year, Anita was ready to move on. She resigned and moved to Europe with her husband. Kimble hired no permanent manager to replace her. Then, in September 1998, Kimble died suddenly at age seventy.

Kimble’s death sealed the fate of the Repository. He apparently had made no provision for the bank in his will. With Anita’s departure, there was no one to collect and distribute sperm. And with Kimble’s death, there was no one to pay for it. In early 1999, Robert Graham’s widow, Marta, Floyd Kimble’s son, Eric, and medical director Frank Andersen decided to shut the Repository for Germinal Choice. After nineteen years and 215 children—not one of them a Nobel baby—the Nobel Prize sperm bank would go out of business.

On April 29, 1999, Andersen announced the shutdown in a letter to donors. He told them that he was arranging for “proper clinical disposal” of the stored sperm. If donors wished to collect their samples for “personal use,” he would try to arrange it, but “you should know before considering such a course that it may be difficult or impossible to find a facility to accept and store the specimens, and that the cost of such an effort would be considerable.”

Donor White tried to save the bank, in his own unobtrusive way. He thought if the shutdown were publicized, some rich man might step in to save it. Roger leaked Andersen’s letter to a San Diego TV station, but it refused to cover the story unless he appeared on camera. Careful of his privacy, he wouldn’t. Instead Roger e-mailed Logan Jenkins, a
San Diego Union-Tribune
columnist, telling him, “I have the feeling that if Dr. Graham were still alive, he would not wish to see his work ended in the manner proposed.” Jenkins did write a column. It ever so slightly regretted the bank’s demise, but Jenkins also did what journalists had always done to the bank—mocked it: “The world’s most notorious sperm bank is undergoing a radical vasectomy. The Repository for Germinal Choice, the mercilessly teased brainchild of Dr. Robert Graham, is tying its tubes after helping produce a litter of 215 genetically boosted babies.” So the Nobel Prize sperm bank died as it had lived, half science, half comedy. Practically every newspaper and TV station in the United States had covered the bank when it opened. Jenkins’s column was the only thing written about it when it closed.

No sperm sugar daddy stepped forward to rescue the bank. The shutdown proceeded as planned. None of the donors requested his sperm back. Marta Graham asked Steve Broder, Graham’s original technician, if he wanted to buy any of the Repository’s equipment for use at California Cryobank. Broder didn’t, but he volunteered to help supervise the closing. One morning in mid-June, Broder and Marta Graham descended on the Escondido office for the final time. The Repository’s records—just a bunch of file folders—had already been entrusted to the Repository’s office manager. (I don’t know where she keeps them; she never answered my queries.) A medical waste company arrived. The liquid-nitrogen vats, the background of hundreds of pictures of Robert Graham clouded in vapor, were emptied and carted away.

Next, spermicide. The frozen vials—once so precious that they had been double-locked and shielded by lead, that reporters had begged for a glance at them, that women had traveled around the globe to get their hands on them—were dumped unceremoniously in red biowaste bags and driven off to the incinerator. Dr. Graham’s dream began in ice and ended in fire.

Neff wasn’t nostalgic when she recounted the end of the bank. “Sperm banking will be a blip in history,” she said. The Nobel sperm bank, she implied, would be a blip on that blip. And in some ways, she is clearly right. The Repository for Germinal Choice pioneered sperm banking but ended up in a fertility cul-de-sac. Other sperm banks took Graham’s best ideas—donor choice, donor testing, and high-achieving donors—and did them better. They offered more choice, more testing, more men. And they managed to do so without Graham’s peculiar eugenics theories, implicit racism, and distaste for single women and lesbians. The Repository died because no one needed it anymore.

But the dream the Repository represented is more alive than ever. Since my two children were born, I have been thrust into the world of yuppie parental ambition. Child making and child rearing have become full-contact sports. Parents start enriching their children in the womb and never stop. The amount of parental involvement in children’s lives is scary. We dose them with Ritalin and antidepressants in the cradle, use Machiavellian maneuvers to enroll them in honors classes and select soccer teams. We live by a competitive creed: We must give our children any edge we can.

For the moment, we seek advantage through drugs and classes and tutors, but we will use genes as soon as we can. The Repository’s notion—that good sperm will make good children—is too crude for our age,*
 
⁶
but more sophisticated science is coming, advancing Graham’s dream to the twenty-first century. The first hints of the new world are already here. A technique called “preimplantation genetic diagnosis” (PGD) allows a doctor to run genetic tests on eight-celled embryos created by IVF. The doctor and parents can then select the most genetically fit embryo for implantation in the womb. At the moment, PGD can screen for only a few genetic diseases (as well as for gender), so it’s used chiefly to help parents protect their kids from dread ailments such as cystic fibrosis. But eventually PGD will be able to tag genes associated with musical ability, blue eyes, or intelligence. When that happens, most parents will still reproduce the old-fashioned way. But the few who really care about beating Mother Nature—the ones who wrote to Dr. Graham in 1980 and who shop for egg donors at Harvard today—will be lining up for PGD and hoping for a prodigy. The old-time eugenics of Graham and Shockley and Galton is dead. No one cares about the national “germ plasm” anymore. But private eugenics has arrived to replace it. If we can get better genes for our own kids, many of us will do so. Just like the first Nobel sperm bank customers, we are captive to the great delusion that we can control our children, that we can make them what we want them to be, rather than what they are.

The question I am most often asked is: Did the Nobel sperm bank work? By which questioners mean: Did it make superkids?

I don’t have a simple answer. Of the 215 children of the Nobel sperm bank, I know of 30, aged six to twenty-two. I’ve met some of them, talked to many of them, and e-mailed with others. In some cases, I have only talked to their parents about them. My sample is not random; these are families that contacted me. They are probably exceptional in all kinds of ways. Most of them, for example, are single-mother families. Intact families tend to be less open about their DI secrets, partly to guard the relationship between father and children. I also suspect that my sample families are
more
satisfied with the Repository, because people are usually more willing to talk to reporters about things they are happy about. Still, let me try to sum the children up.

A few of them—Alton Grant, for example—have brilliant minds. A few others have wonderful physical talents: there are a couple of superb dancers and at least one amazing singer. Of the rest, most are very good if not great students. Several kids perform below average in school. Almost all are in excellent health, but one boy in the group is autistic and one girl suffers from a debilitating muscle disease. In short, they are certainly above average as a group, but the range is very wide.

Is this a tribute to Robert Graham and his great sperm? I don’t know, but I doubt it. These are fortunate children: they come from prosperous homes—middle class and up—and they have exceptionally attentive mothers. Most children would thrive in such surroundings. Measuring what the sperm donor contributed is simply impossible. Yes, the smartest of the kids had smart donors, but they also have smart mothers, and they have been raised in intellectually challenging environments. The most physically gifted had physically gifted donors, but they also have physically gifted mothers, and their parents have cultivated their talents. So the question of what the Repository gave its children is unanswerable. Though I suppose it could be answered this way: of all the parents I talked to, only one regretted using the Repository. The Nobel sperm bank may not have met the world’s expectations, but it met the expectations of those who mattered most: its customers.

The children of the Repository for Germinal Choice have certainly
not
become an elite, celebrated cadre, as Graham hoped in his most ambitious moments. All the children lead very private lives—except one: the prodigious Doron Blake, the Repository’s second child and its most celebrated public legacy. Doron’s early achievements—computers at two,
Hamlet
at five, IQ of 180—and his mother’s publicity seeking made him the bank’s adorable mascot. In 1995, when Doron had reached the venerable age of thirteen, Graham declared, “When Doron Blake is old enough, I’m going to ask him to become a sperm donor himself at the Repository.” But within two years, Graham was dead. By the time Doron turned eighteen in 2000, the bank was gone.

The Repository died, but the fascination with Doron lived on. Reporters kept calling him to find out how Graham’s experiment had turned out. As a prodigy and as practically the only Repository child who talked openly to the press, Doron was a precious commodity. He turned the media interest into a nice income stream. Any reporter who wanted to talk to him had to pay. Before he turned eighteen, his mom, Afton, dunned reporters and deposited the proceeds in a college fund. Now that he is an adult, Doron has taken over the business, asking $500 and more per interview. He uses the cash to clear college loans, buy books, pay for vacation travel. Doron told me in 2001 that he had performed his sperm-and-pony show for more than a hundred reporters, from Japanese TV crews to British tabloid reporters to
60 Minutes.
*
 
⁷

I had read countless articles about Doron as a tyke, all filled with his quick wit and his insufferable boasting. I had also seen how his mother had made a spectacle of him, sharing intimate facts about his life with millions of readers and viewers. I wanted to know what Doron had become as an adult and what it was like to be the Repository’s symbol. In spring 2001, I tracked him down at Reed College, where he was an eighteen-year-old finishing his freshman year. After I had left several messages on his sitar-twanging answering machine, we finally talked.

“I was [Robert Graham’s] emblem. I was the boy with the high IQ who was not screwed up. I was his ideal result.”

I had seen pictures of Doron: he was a goateed, gentle-looking hippie. His voice, however, was suffused with ennui and bitterness. The reason for the ennui was obvious: he had delivered this spiel many times before, and he was sick of it. (Doron, who usually stuttered, didn’t when he was talking about sperm. Maybe he was too well rehearsed.) But the bitterness came from somewhere else. He said “ideal result” with derision. When Doron was a boy and his mother, Afton, was thrusting him in front of the cameras, he was the hero of the Nobel sperm bank. Now that he was an adult and controlled his story, he was giving it a different ending.