Book Excerpt: 'The Genius Factory'

June 13, 2005 — -- Robert K. Graham was a millionaire who set out to create a sperm bank stocked solely with the sperm of Nobel laureates. During its 19 years, The Repository for Germinal Choice, also known as the genius sperm bank, sparked a great deal of controversy. Critics accused Graham of being a racist and a white supremacist for trying to create a race of "superkids."

The sperm bank produced 215 children between 1980 and 1999. "Good Morning America" spoke to one of those children -- Leandra Ramm, who is now 20 years old and studying to be an opera singer in New York. She doesn't know who her biological father is, but knows he was a scientist who works at a university and has published major research in his field. She doesn't have any ethical complications about her unusual parentage. In fact, she refers to Robert Graham, who died in 1997, as her "grandfather."

You can read an excerpt about this controversial topic in "The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank," by David Plotz, below.

The Los Angeles Times headline beckoned like a bulletin from the future: "Sperm Bank Donors All Nobel Winners: Plan Seeks to Enrich Human Gene Pool." It was February 29, 1980, Leap Day -- that strange quasi-day seemed right for such an otherworldly story. The article began by describing the sperm bank as "the world's most exclusive men's club," then piled on the weirdness: a reclusive zillionaire … a secret cadre of Nobel geniuses … the women of Mensa … a mysterious, ultramodern fertility technology … a sinister experiment to improve the human race. It sounded like something out of a James Bond movie.

The article introduced America to Robert K. Graham -- a most unlikely sperm banker. The 74-year-old optometrist, who had made $100 million by inventing shatterproof plastic eyeglasses, was on a mission to collect sperm from Nobel laureates. He was storing the prize seed in an underground bunker on his Escondido, Calif., estate, and he was distributing it only to women smart enough to qualify for the high-IQ society Mensa. Graham had given his sperm bank a name that had the thud of second-rate science fiction: "The Repository for Germinal Choice."

Graham told Times reporter Edwin Chen he had already enlisted three Nobel prize-winning scientists to "deliver" their sperm, and eventually he intended to canvass all the world's Nobel laureates. So far, Graham said, two dozen Mensa women had contacted him -- he had told the Mensa Bulletin about the bank a few months earlier -- and he had shipped frozen Nobel sperm to three of them.

The sperm bank was not a prank, Graham insisted to Chen, and not a rich man's folly. Graham said he was trying to save mankind from genetic catastrophe. In modern America, the millionaire complained, cradle-to-grave social welfare programs paid incompetents and imbeciles to reproduce. As a result, "retrograde humans" were swamping the intelligent minority. This "dysgenic" crisis would soon cause the evolutionary regression of mankind, as well as global communism. How could we save ourselves? Graham had the answer. Our best specimens -- and "specimens" is just the kind of word Graham would use to describe people -- must have more children. His Nobel Prize sperm bank would father a cadre of leaders, scientists and politicians who would help reverse the genetic decline. Graham was not charging his customers or paying his donors. He and his Nobelists were making a gift of the genius genes, a lifesaving present to a dying world. Graham promised to study the children of his supersperm, tracking their development, achievements and IQ. He would publish his findings in scientific journals, vindicating his extraordinary semen and his experiment.

Graham outlined his ideas to Chen with an unapologetic bluntness. "The principles of this may not be popular, but they are sound," he said. "So far, we've refused to apply to humans what we already know and apply to animals and plants."

Graham gave Chen a tour of the bank, such as it was. Graham owned 10 beautiful acres in Escondido, a thriving town half an hour northeast of San Diego. In Graham's prizewinning garden, in the shadow of the American flag that Graham flew over his property, sat a concrete bunker the size of a modest bathroom. The bunker was a few feet underground and slightly dank. It had once been a pump house; Graham had converted it into a small laboratory. Its prize equipment was a lead-sheathed, waist-high vat of liquid nitrogen. Graham opened the vat and showed Chen what he claimed was the Nobel sperm, a few dozen ampules frozen at 196 degrees below zero centigrade.

Graham wouldn't disclose the names of his three Nobel donors, so Chen wasn't sure if Graham was an honest eccentric or a con artist. After all, Nobel laureates' sperm looked like anyone else's; Graham's vials could just as well have contained seed from his gardener. Chen called every Nobelist he could find in California and asked if he had made a sperm deposit. One after another said no. A dozen had never heard of Graham's project. Another 10 admitted that Graham had contacted them but said they had turned him down. Most were scornful. "It's pretty silly," Medicine Laureate Max Delbrück told Chen. Chemistry and Peace Laureate Linus Pauling said he had nixed Graham: "The old-fashioned way is still best." Medicine Nobelist Renato Dulbecco, who hadn't been contacted, burst out laughing at the idea, "Oh come, come. This is fantastic. … It's too late for me. I was vasectomized long ago."