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.

CHAPTER 1

THE GENETIC PASSION OF ROBERT GRAHAM

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 seventy-four-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, California, 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 ten 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...