The Genius Factory by David Plotz Page B

be measured. Scientific ability could be counted in numbers of patents or an IQ score. There was no place for a Picasso or Roosevelt in Graham’s Pantheon. A Shakespeare play couldn’t light a city at night or fly to the moon. Inventors were the only people who changed the world, and it was their genes that needed saving. (Graham never grappled with a basic contradiction in his own thought: inventions made life more comfortable for the masses, yet Graham believed that comfort was what encouraged the shiftless and stupid to reproduce so rapidly. Thus the better the inventors made the world, the worse the evolutionary crisis.)
    Graham always described the Repository as a “genius” sperm bank, yet in some ways he wasn’t actually seeking genius. The kind of genius in a Leonardo or an Einstein—incomprehensible, impossible for ordinary minds to follow—was too difficult for Graham. Partly Graham knew, as most scholars of genius have recognized, that it was impossible to manufacture an Einstein. Such transcendent genius arrived uninvited and unexpected, and tended to disappear, too. Einstein left no Einstein-like kids. But Graham also ignored that kind of genius because it didn’t match the intelligence he admired: high analytical and technical ability married to hard work. Graham wouldn’t have known what to do with an oddball like Einstein. He did know what to do with a dozen engineers.
    With Muller dead, Graham felt free to make the bank
he
wanted to make. Graham scrapped Muller’s idea of waiting till a donor was twenty-five years dead before releasing the sperm: the world was going to hell too fast to wait. He also abandoned Muller’s altruism requirement for donors, which he had always thought was pointless. So in the late 1970s, Graham fired off flattering letters to all the Nobel Science laureates he could find in California. Their genes were precious, he told them. Could they do a good deed for the world? Would they share their glorious genetic heritage with desperate infertile couples?
    When a Nobelist responded to a letter with even the slightest interest, Graham followed up with effusive phone calls to schedule a collection. He took Broder on his collecting expeditions, and both men loved the trips. Broder, still in his twenties, was starstruck when he met the laureates. Graham took pleasure in adding the Nobelists to his lifelong collection of Great Men. (Sometimes the sperm bank seemed a kind of supercharged autograph collection for Graham.) Graham was respectful toward the donors. He always called them “Doctor.” He read up on them in advance and asked them polite, informed questions about their work, but not too many, because he thought their time was precious. Even with the Nobelists, however, Graham was unbothered by the inherent awkwardness of asking a man to masturbate in a cup for him.
    At first, Graham and Broder collected sperm nearby. They would book a pair of rooms at San Diego’s famed Torrey Pines Lodge and fly the donor in. The donor would perform in one room. They would immediately process the sample in the other. (“I don’t think we brought ‘inspirational literature,’ ” said Broder, using the industry euphemism for pornography. “They were older fellows and that did not seem appropriate.”) Sometimes Graham and Broder had to make peculiar accommodations. Broder had a strenuous arrangement with a donor he describes only as a “world-famous scientist” in Los Angeles. The scientist would call Broder and instruct him to drive by a particular intersection in Century City at a given time. When Broder pulled up, the scientist would open the passenger-side door of Broder’s car, drop in a paper bag containing the sample cup, and vanish. Broder would rush it back to his lab and ice it.
    In the 1970s sperm collecting was new and mysterious, and Graham and Broder encountered bumps whenever they had to explain what they were doing. In July 1978, for example, Graham and Broder made