The Genius Factory by David Plotz Page A

California Cryobank, and the Sperm Bank of California—all began in California in the late 1970s. The state’s progressivism and self-improvement ethos made it ideal soil for sperm banks: Customers, libertarian in their sexual and personal behavior, were willing to try anything. And Escondido was the just-right town for Graham’s brew of futurism and conservatism. Escondido was located halfway between San Diego, with its defense and biotech industries, and the Central Valley, California’s agricultural heartland. San Diego’s no-limits futurism was on one side of Graham, the Central Valley’s cultural conservatism on the other. With its hills bulldozed into housing developments, its glorious desert valleys irrigated into golf courses, Escondido had the feel of an engineered Eden, a naturally perfect place that man
still
thought he could improve. It was a place where anything seemed possible, as long as it didn’t raise property tax rates.
    Graham was eager to get started, but he knew nothing about freezing sperm. He was an optometrist. He made inquiries and learned that a young lab technician named Stephen Broder was the man to see. Broder worked at the Tyler Clinic, Los Angeles’ leading fertility shop, and he had as much experience banking sperm as anyone did in 1976—which is to say, not much. Graham hired Broder to equip a small lab for him. Broder bought him a few microscopes, some storage vials, and two liquid-nitrogen tanks big enough to hold a few thousand sperm samples. Broder taught Graham how to “process” semen—to measure its potency, dilute it with a preservative solution, and store it in liquid nitrogen. Graham was already seventy years old, but he took to sperm collecting like a boy to baseball cards. He loved fiddling about with the small vials.
    The idea of a genius sperm bank made a certain amount of sense, but never as much as Graham dreamed. Graham was making the best of the crude science of his time. If you were hoping to give kids better genes, this was all you could hope to do in the late 1970s. At the time, sperm collection was practically the only widely available fertility treatment that worked. Social science research was beginning to show that intelligence was at least partly heritable. So it was logical that if you were going to have a sperm bank, you might as well select smart men, rather than drag Joe Donors off the street, which is more or less what other banks were doing.
    Nothing much was likely to go wrong with Nobel donors, but nor were they the great boon Graham believed they were. Graham thought his donors would supply a massive intelligence boost. In fact, the genetic improvement was probably minuscule. Nobel sperm would give
modest
odds of
slightly
better genes in the
half
share of chromosomes supplied by the father. And even then Graham would be operating on only the nature side of the equation: he had no control over nurture—schools, upbringing, parents. This was a formula for a B-plus student, not the “secular savior” Graham hoped to breed.
    Graham puzzled over which men should stock his bank. At first he considered a military sperm bank—only West Point and Naval Academy grads. But eventually he returned to his original idea: the world’s smartest men. The best objective measure of
useful
intelligence, Graham thought, was the Nobel Prize—and not just any Nobel Prize but a Nobel Prize in the sciences. He had a narrow imagination about human accomplishment. Graham didn’t believe in “multiple intelligences”: He believed in
one
intelligence. When he talked about intelligence, all he meant was practical problem-solving ability: Edison, Fulton, Watson, or Crick. (Graham valued, by miraculous coincidence,
exactly
the same kind of analytical talent he himself possessed.) He was blind to the intelligence required for artistic genius, for psychological insight, or for political deftness. Those kinds of intelligence were worthless to Graham, because they couldn’t