The Genius Factory (29 page)

“It was a screwed-up idea, making genius people,” he said. “The fact that I have a huge IQ does not make me a person who is good or happy. People come expecting me to have all these achievements under my belt, and I don’t. I have not done anything that special.

“I don’t think being intelligent is what makes a person. What makes a person is being raised in a loving family with loving parents who don’t pressure them. If I was born with an IQ of 100 and not 180, I could do just as much with my life. I don’t think you can breed for good people.”

Both Afton Blake and Doron insist that she never pressured him into his youthful achievements. She was an indulgent mother, but she wasn’t a stage mom. Doron discovered by himself that he was a math prodigy and a wonderful musician. He shone at a Los Angeles school for the gifted, then won a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, one of the best high schools in the nation.

But if Afton didn’t coerce Doron into achieving, she did something worse. She turned her son’s life into
The Truman Show.
British tabloid journalists visited his dorm. His love life was bandied about in print; also his difficulty making friends. His accomplishments were national news. Doron loved his mom enormously, but he had come to realize how his public childhood had twisted his life. Doron’s story was supposed to have been about nature, about his Nobel-sperm-bank-derived genetic gifts. But as Doron told it, he made it clear that he thought it was about nurture. “It was not the best thing for me to grow up in the spotlight. This is something I realized recently. I never enjoyed the media appearances, and I did not really understand the effects on me till now,” he said.

“I have always been a shy spend-time-alone kind of person. Being in the public has made me very uncomfortable. It is one reason why now I feel that people are not going to like me. I always feel like people are examining me and probing me. It is much better for kids to grow up in a safe environment. It would have been much better if Mom had not had me microprobed.

“Most of being a prodigy was negative,” he continued. “People have always been saying ‘prodigy sperm child’ all my life. But I am not that wonderful at anything. You feel a lot of pressure because you don’t want to let people down, or you don’t really feel free to be what you want to be.

“Mom did not mean to, but she put a burden on me by making me feel like someone special,” he once said. “I’m always hearing that I’m special. I don’t want to be special.”

Doron told me he believed he was “smart” in the sense that he processed information quickly. He did think that was genetic. He also thought it didn’t matter. In fact, he seemed to be going out of his way to avoid using that intelligence. Since he’d started college, he had abandoned math and science, the subjects he excelled at. He was intending to major in comparative religion. He was also passionate about music—fluent on piano, guitar, and sitar—but apprehensive about playing in public. The only career he could imagine for himself was teaching at his old high school, Phillips Exeter—“where brilliant kids have brilliant thoughts.” Maybe this was just the loneliness of freshman year speaking. Still, his hope of a return to Exeter seemed poignant. He wanted to go back in the place where he had been safest and happiest.

Doron didn’t exactly resent his sperm bank birth. One of the first things he said to me, in fact, was that the reason he did interviews was that he wanted to show people that sperm bank kids were just like everyone else. Still, he was remarkably uncurious about his donor. He said the BBC had approached him a couple of years earlier and told him it had figured out the identity of Donor Red #28, his father. They asked Doron if he wanted to meet him. Doron said he told them that he would meet him but didn’t really care. How little did this matter to him? Doron claimed, and I believe him, that he had forgotten Red 28’s name after the BBC had told him. “I think it was John, and he was a computer scientist of some sort.

“Genes have never been important to me. Family is the people you love. I feel a lot closer to people who are not my blood than to those who are. Those blood ties have never been enough to hold me ever. [The donor] is not part of my life. He has no place in my life whatsoever. He is no more than a stranger.”

It is hard to imagine what Robert Graham would have made of his favorite offspring, now that he was all grown up. Graham prized science and scorned emotion. He hoped his sperm bank kids would build computers and synthesize medicines. Doron, once the math whiz, had disavowed hard science for the softest of studies, human spirituality. Graham had dismissed his own youthful musical career as a “waste”; Doron lived through his music. Graham sought athletic, macho donors. Doron despised sports and couldn’t stand manly men. Graham hoped his sperm bank kids would lead the world. Doron’s ambition was to teach high school. Doron was everything that Graham dreamed of—hyperarticulate, smart, brutally honest—yet he rejected all that Graham preached about genetics and intelligence. The power of Doron’s brain vindicated Graham. The feeling in Doron’s heart rejected him.

EPILOGUE

SEPTEMBER 2004

W
hen Tom returned home from visiting Jeremy in Florida, he expected that he and his new dad would stay close. Tom was gratified when Jeremy immediately kept one promise he had made to Tom in Miami: Jeremy tracked down the forms that Lana needed for her green card application and FedExed them to Kansas City. Jeremy also called Lana on her birthday in November and sent Tom $100 for Christmas. But in other ways, in the ways that mattered to Tom, he and Jeremy drifted apart. They didn’t talk much, a phone call or two per month. When they did, the conversations were comfortable but shallow. Jeremy reneged his his promise to visit Kansas City in the fall. He said he would come around New Year’s, but that didn’t happen, either. Instead, Jeremy pushed the visit back a few more months. Maybe he’d come in May, he said. By late January, Jeremy had stopped calling Tom. He was still friendly when Tom called him, but Tom got the message: Jeremy’s interest was sagging.

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 Michael 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.