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Product Description

It was the most radical human-breeding experiment in American history, and no one knew how it turned out. The Repository for Germinal Choice–nicknamed the Nobel Prize sperm bank–opened to notorious fanfare in 1980, and for two decades, women flocked to it from all over the country to choose a sperm donor from its roster of Nobel-laureate scientists, mathematical prodigies, successful businessmen, and star athletes. But the bank quietly closed its doors in 1999–its founder dead, its confidential records sealed, and the fate of its children and donors unknown. In early 2001, award-winning columnist David Plotz set out to solve the mystery of the Nobel Prize sperm bank.

Plotz wrote an article for Slate inviting readers to contact him–confidentially–if they knew anything about the bank. The next morning, he received an email response, then another, and another–each person desperate to talk about something they had kept hidden for years. Now, in The Genius Factory, Plotz unfolds the full and astonishing story of the Nobel Prize sperm bank and its founder’s radical scheme to change our world.

Believing America was facing genetic catastrophe, Robert Graham, an eccentric millionaire, decided he could reverse the decline by artificially inseminating women with the sperm of geniuses. In February 1980, Graham opened the Repository for Germinal Choice and stocked it with the seed of gifted scientists, inventors, and thinkers. Over the next nineteen years, Graham’s “genius factory” produced more than two hundred children.


What happened to them? Were they the brilliant offspring that Graham expected? Did any of the “superman” fathers care about the unknown sons and daughters who bore their genes? What were the mothers like?

Crisscrossing the country and logging countless hours online, Plotz succeeded in tracking down previously unknown family members–teenage half-brothers who ended up following vastly different paths, mothers who had wondered for years about the identities of the donors they had selected on the basis of code names and brief character profiles, fathers who were proud or ashamed or simply curious about the children who had been created from their sperm samples.

The children of the “genius factory” are messengers from the future–a future that is bearing down on us fast. What will families be like when parents routinely “shop” for their kids’ genes? What will children be like when they’re programmed for greatness? In this stunning, eye-opening book, one of our finest young journalists previews America’s coming age of genetic expectations.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #616656 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-07
• Released on: 2005-06-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Amazon.com Review
Robert Graham, the oddball inventor and millionaire at the heart of David Plotz's book, The Genius Factory, is the archetype for the cliché, "more money than brains." It was Graham who reckoned America was going to hell in a hand basket and the best way to halt the trend was to impregnate women with sperm donated by Nobel Prize winners and other overachievers (providing they were smart and white). Forget for the moment the not-so-thinly-veiled racism powering the whole eugenics movement that served as the backbone of Graham's Repository for Germinal Choice. Graham's super-sperm idea also conveniently overlooked the fact that the women carrying the babies would also leave a genetic imprint while ignoring the nurture-versus-nature argument. Though Plotz addresses these concepts in his book, the real reason to recommend it is its characters, the sperm bank progeny Plotz unearths through intense and covert legwork. The book's humor is also a selling point: "In abstract, donating sperm seemed fundamentally silly. But actually doing it was seductive," Plotz writes. "I had been accepted by the ultraexclusive Fairfax Cryobak! My sperm was 'well above average'! My count was 105 million! What's yours, George Clooney?" Elsewhere, Plotz writes, "By late 1980, Graham found himself presiding over a Nobel Prize sperm bank that had no Nobel Prize donors, no Nobel sperm left in storage and no Nobel babies. None of the first three women who'd been inseminated with Nobel sperm had gotten pregnant. In fact, no one inseminated with the Nobel sperm ever got pregnant. The Nobel Prize sperm bank would never produce a single Nobel baby." No matter. Graham's experiment, which did produce dozens of non-Nobel babies, was a success in one regard: it made for a heck of a story. And in Plotz's capable hands, it also makes for a heck of a book. --Kim Hughes

From Publishers Weekly
Building on a series of articles he wrote for Slate, Plotz investigates the legacy of the Repository for Germinal Choice, a California sperm bank that was to have been stocked exclusively by Nobel laureates. Very few donors in the institution's 19-year run really had Nobels, and the one publicly acknowledged laureate was William Shockley, a notorious racist. Plotz has fun poking holes in the eugenic vision of the repository's founder, self-made millionaire Robert Graham, and his ambition to collect "the Godiva of sperm." More captivating, however, is Plotz's recounting of the efforts of the women who visited the repository to discover the identities of their donors. As he gets to know a cluster of families and donors, Plotz reaches insightful conclusions about the unforeseen emotional consequences of artificial insemination. The "reunions" his research helps bring about include the elderly scientist who adopts a grandfatherly role in a young girl's life and a teenager who takes his wife and infant son along to meet his "dad" and finds him sharing a house with Florida drug dealers. The attempt to breed genius babies may have an aura of surreal humor, but the sensitive narration always reminds us of the real lives affected—and created—through this oddball utopian scheme. B&w photos. Agent, Rafe Sagalyn. (On sale June 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
William Shockley was a Nobel Prize winner, a brilliant engineer and an unrepentant racist. His prize was in physics, but it gave him a soapbox from which to make repugnant pronouncements about biology. He supposed, for instance, that there were "some . . . good things about Hitler," such as "some significant amount of elimination of genetic diseases" as a result of his genocidal policies. Touting a more capitalist approach to ethnic cleansing in this country, he proposed a "Voluntary Sterilization Bonus Plan" in the late 1960s that would pay people with sub-optimal IQs to be sterilized: $1,000 for every IQ point below 100. This misguided genius also made a "deposit" at the so-called Nobel Prize sperm bank, which opened in 1980. This made enough news that, in its early years, the sperm bank had as its most public face the narrow, expressionless, reviled visage of Stanford University's William Shockley.

But the real brains behind the sperm bank, as David Plotz tells us in this lively account of a shameful history, was not Shockley at all. It was Robert Graham -- more refined and courtly than Shockley, slightly less prone to vile statements, but just as much of a racist. Indeed, Graham is the one whose racism was truly scary because it was dressed up in the trappings of patriotism, altruism and, most of all, science.

Graham, an optometrist who made his fortune by inventing shatterproof spectacles, "had the right-wing politics of a self-made millionaire, the relentless inquisitiveness of an inventor, the can-do spirit of an entrepreneur, and the moxie of a salesman." America was facing a "dysgenic" crisis, Graham insisted, with social welfare programs that enabled "retrograde humans" to give birth to too many incompetents and imbeciles. To counteract this trend, he opened the Repository for Germinal Choice, a highly selective sperm bank, in an underground, radiation-proof bunker on his 10-acre estate near San Diego. It was, Plotz writes, a case of southern California meets Brave New World, an enterprise that "exuded optimism, pragmatism, malevolence, and goofiness."

When the sperm bank opened, Graham said he already had sperm from three Nobel laureates and requests for insemination from two dozen women whose test results were high enough to qualify them for the high-IQ club Mensa. By the time the Repository for Germinal Choice closed its doors in 1999, it had accumulated a list of hundreds of would-be mothers, most of them very smart, and brought 217 babies into the world. Just how smart or otherwise remarkable these babies were is still an open question.

The Genius Factory began as a series for the online magazine Slate, and it shows; the book is occasionally too hip for its own good. Plotz is a little overfond of the clever turn of phrase, such as calling the sperm bank Graham's "supercharged autograph collection."

But most of the time Plotz is an engaging and confident storyteller -- and he has a terrific yarn to tell. The book is best when it focuses on Graham, Shockley and other outrageous late-20th-century eugenicists, such as the leading British biologist J.B.S. Haldane and the brilliant American geneticist Hermann Muller, who were not sperm donors. It works less well when Plotz describes the handful of children conceived through the Repository for Germinal Choice whom he managed to meet, at which point it becomes a sort of Internet detective story. In his Slate articles about the sperm bank, Plotz indicated that he hoped to find some of the women who had been clients there. Of the 200-plus Nobel sperm-bank babies, he began by knowing the details of only two: Victoria Kowalski, the first "genius baby," whose parents turned out to be convicted felons who whisked their daughter off to the backwoods of Arkansas after some embarrassing publicity; and Doron Blake, the second genius baby, who appeared on the cover of Mother Jones in 1983, at the age of 1, and who has been trotted out ever since as an example of exactly what Graham was trying to produce: a math whiz, a music prodigy, a brilliant child with an IQ of 180. Blake graduated from Reed College last year.

Roughly half of The Genius Factory, then, is about Plotz's interactions with the women he was able to track down and with the children they raised (most of them on their own, even though they were all married at the time of their pregnancies). He met the children, developed crushes on some of the mothers and accompanied the pairs to reunions with their sperm donors, whom some of the kids insisted on thinking of as "dad." He even put one pair of half-brothers (same sperm donor, code-named "Coral") in touch with each other and lets us eavesdrop on their e-mail correspondence.

Along the way, Plotz paints some lively portraits of pathetic sperm donors 20 years later -- not a Nobel laureate among them. One is a failed physician who lied on his application about having an IQ of 160 (he never even took the test, he now admits). Another, the son of a Nobel Prize winner, has no apparent means of support other than giving occasional piano lessons and making frequent donations to various sperm banks (this, Plotz says, is the only person he ever met outside the porn industry "who thought of masturbation as labor"). The scenes of the donors' children finding their fathers, and being forced to come to terms with their own legacies, are beautifully done.

These children, says Plotz, are "messengers from our future." Here we are on the brink of an era when designer babies with modified genes will be run of the mill, he writes, and these children give us a chance to see what happened deploying version 1.0 of genetic engineering: "Using the most advanced (but still crude) technology of his age -- a sperm bank with elite sperm donors -- [Graham] had persuaded women they could bear children with the 'best' genes available, children who would be smarter, healthier, and happier than nature would have permitted." The result was sort of a bust.

Plotz raises some compelling questions about the nature of genius, the meaning of genes and the idea that, as he so nicely puts it, "there is serendipity in DNA." This is perhaps his most serious point: that a seemingly ideal sperm donor -- indeed, any father or, for that matter, any mother -- "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."

Reviewed by Robin Marantz Henig
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Customer Reviews

Fun, But Serious
The Genius Factory manages to be a page-turner that pokes fun at its subject while simultaneously giving it serious treatment. Many books that start out as magazine articles merely feel stretched out when expanded into a book. In the case of the Genius Factory the extra pages, and expanded treatment are well worth it.

The book deals with three interesting and important stories, weaving them together in a first person account as the author learns more about his subject. The first story is the history of the eugenics movement and how the quest for more perfect people (often motivated by simplistic racist notions) led to the idea of a sperm bank that would hold the sperm of geniuses (crudely defined as Nobel prize winning scientists). This story is filled with colorful characters such as Robert Graham - the originator of the sperm bank - the inventor of plastic eyeglass lenses, and William Shockley - one of the Nobel Prize winners who contributed sperm - winner of the Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor (he is the father of Silicon Valley and his company was the progenitor of intel). It is also a story of racism, misguided notions of improving mankind, and a philosophy that leads to Nazism.

The second story is the story of the families. Plotz tracked down several of the children that resulted from the sperm bank, and he got to know the children and their parents. He also tracked down some of the donors, and their stories are in some cases more complex and interesting than I would have imagined. I don't want to give away too much, so I'll just say that the experience of the families and the impact of the experience is fascinating.

The third story is the story of fertility treatments. While this story is not as developed as the other two, as events develop, the history of fertility treatments becomes significant as it intertwines with the story of artificial insemination.

I read this book in one sitting, and it was as compelling as any mystery. While it is written in a playful tone, it does takes its subject seriously and observes its characters with compassion. This is far from the most authoritative source you can find on the subjects covered, but it is highly entertaining, informative and thought-provoking.

Genius Factory Produces a High Quality Read
From my first glance between the pages, I knew I wouldn't be able to put this book down. It is part history, part science, part editorial, part sociological study; and has an appeal to a wide audience.

The success stories are few but they are well-written and are more detailed than one might expect from a news report. It is very easy to get emotionally involved with the outcomes of the children which resulted from the sperm donors. Plotz has a unique style, providing enough information to satisfy the reader at every chapter, but leaving the reader curious of the outcome. I very much enjoyed Plotz's speculative prose as it made each story a personal journey as well.

Plotz also places the sperm bank, Graham, and others in historical context. He provides short biographies of the scientists involved with the project, a short history of IVF, and events and anecdotes which depict the sociology of the times. He makes some vast reaching claims on the relationship between American eugenics and Nazism and others; and while all are abhorrent, no evidence for direct links was provided. The speculation however, was nonetheless interesting.

There is a chapter in which he discusses the significance of the mother's genetic material in regards to the personality and success of each child, which put the sperm donation in a more complete and proper perspective. He also briefly describes the phenomenon known as imprinting.

My largest criticism of the book is in regards to the occasional word choice. The author clearly states his background, which to some degree puts his comments in perspective. But one wonders if the author is aware of how his subconscious views are closer to the eugenics perspective than he might think. While the author clearly aims to make eugenics seem nothing other than a bigoted pseudo-science, he uses derogatory labels to refer to some groups, particularly those without secondary education. The trail of the putative Nobel children appears to have been not only a journalistic passion but a personal one; a journey to define intelligence and to some extent, success.

The Genius Factory is a fascinating glimpse into the obsessive minds of Graham, the fear-ridden pseudo-science of the 1950's, the plight of the parents and children of Grahams experiment, and a look into a world not dictated by genes but of possibility.

a need to breed
This book tells the spectacular story of the "Nobel" sperm bank started by an American enthusiast of eugenics. High IQ and good looking individuals were recruited, although their claims to being superior specimens would not always hold up years later when they were met by their surrogate children in person. Indeed with lax security (and journalists like the author) it was possible to bridge the gap and contact one's donor. Results, as you might expect, are varied.

Although some of the derision and disgust toward the donors and their families was justified, I felt it should not have been so marked. While it is easy to lose your professional distance writing about people who are by turns moving and repelling, I thought the author should have contained himself.

It did not seem to me that donating sperm gave him a more understanding and empathic view of those who did. Instead it simply gave him a sense of inflated self-importance because he was told he had superior sperm. While pride is understandable, I felt it should have been omitted, as it detracted from the stories of the donors and their families.

What was moving, however, was the story of the elderly donor and his "granddaughter," and the conclusions several children came to that it was the heart not the brain that ultimately influenced how worthwhile an individual is. As the author points out, advances in gene technology now make it possible to screen for various characteristics of the fetus, and more are in the works. Sometimes it's the "soul" that gets lost in the process.