Plotz, D. (2005). The Genius Factory: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank.

Plotz, D. (2005). The Genius Factory: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. New York: Simon & Schuster (262 pp., $24.95, cloth, ISBN-0-7432-7563-2).

If, as a woman, you wanted a gifted child and had no man to oblige, what could you do? If you were fertile between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, you would head for the Repository for Germinal Choice in Pasadena, South California. There you would expect to be able to select and purchase frozen sperm of the finest quality, donated by men with the finest minds. These were advertised as having won at least one Nobel Prize: men like William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor. He was their big selling point--the man who believed in passing on the genes of highly intelligent and highly achieving men. Seemed a waste, he thought, not to make better use of such precious semen.

It started slowly, the, urn, brainchild of Robert Graham, an optometrist who lived in awe of the rich and famous and had acquired a lot of money making plastic contact lenses. He was a stickler. His company, Armorlite, had "failed and failed and failed" until fashion changed in his favor and he multiplied his income a thousand-fold. Three wives and many offspring later, Graham decided to spread his largesse even more widely by improving America's gene pool. He had no specified religion, but a deep faith in eugenics. When his Sperm Bank finally took off, women flocked to take advantage of the contents of the powerful freezers. It was likely, after all, to be more effective than prayer.

David Plotz has written a lively personal story of his search for the men, women and offspring involved with the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank, as it came to be called--the world's most exclusive men's club. He is an assiduous researcher and writes well, setting Graham's activities in the context of the American zeal for improving the nation's stock. This started in the 1920s, and was supported by the very richest, who aimed to stop the "wrong" kind of people from reproducing. Plotz even experienced giving his own donation, which he found to be rather, um, seedy. He tracked down Repository fathers, mothers and children, using the best salesmen's foot-in-the-door techniques.

Graham did understand that it was impossible to manufacture an Einstein. Even Einstein couldn't manage that. Instead, Graham aimed to make hard working engineers, strangely like himself, with of course, high-altitude IQs. He flattered and pleaded with the kind of men he admired to be donors; few were willing. So, from the Bank's peak in 1984, when more than a thousand women bought from Graham's stall, it was downhill all the way. An element of snake-oil selling appeared. Intellectually, donors became less and less likely to be up to scratch, though the paying customers were unaware that they were not getting the advertised product. Some older men were rewarded only by pleasure at generating lots of babies, while students found money useful. Graham's aim was not to engender nerds. They seemed, he felt, somehow un-American. No Bill Gates or freak genius children wanted; only all-rounders: mathematicians who could play football. Such fine-tuning, with minimal regard for the constitution of the women who were to bear the infants, did not make for an easy goal.

Nobody knows how many of these babies were born, and of those how many were unknowing half-siblings. There seems to have been no regulation to this enterprise. Hundreds may have been related to each other. No father was allowed to know of his offspring, though the occasional worker at the Bank sneaked out a little information and a photograph to them. Most fathers had no interest in their potential offspring, though a few yearned for just a sight of one of them. Mothers felt the same about the fathers. Most simply bought their sperm and only a few wanted to meet them.

But what about the anticipated genius children? Did Graham have success in bringing them to life? There was a boy called Doron (meaning gift), a "math whiz," whose classmates mocked him as 'spermboy' because he boasted of his unknown father. Plotz gives an example of his youthful attitudes, reflecting his pressured upbringing:

Interviewer: "You read Hamlet in kindergarten?"

Doron: "Good gosh. Can't everyone!" It's a problem. Plotz writes: When your mom tells you you have to do better, you try to do better. But when your mom tells you your genes tell you you have to do better, it's different. You lose your free will. In some ways, the only logical response is to rebel and screw up, just to prove that your genes don't rule you. (p.129)

So that's what Doron did. He rejected everything that his mother and Graham had striven so hard for, instead he played his guitar while trying to be spiritually a better person.

Not a single gifted or talented adult was known to have emerged from the Nobel Sperm Bank. It has folded. But the assumption of a child's high-level genetic potential still provides the basis for parents to pressure them to high achievement, and children still suffer emotionally from that pressure. Perhaps it's easier if you know who your father is and can react to him, positively or negatively, as a human being. But on the whole the people who brought up the Sperm Bank donors' children behaved like any other parents and produced children who were much like other children.

Reviewed by Dr. Joan Freeman, Founding President of the European Council for High Ability and Professor at Middlesex University, London, UK. Her many publications and world-wide presentations on the development of gifts and talents are based on her considerable research. She is a chartered (licensed) psychologist. E-mail: www.joanfreeman.com