CHAPTER 2
MANUFACTURING GENIUS
Fitter Family contest winner, Eastern States Exposition, 1925. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society
When I tell someone I’m writing a book about a Nobel Prize sperm bank, this is the usual response: First a quizzical “It’s a novel?” Second—after I shake my head “no”—a laughing double-take. “You’re kidding. That’s a joke, right?” At a distance of twenty years, Robert Graham’s sperm bank does seem like nothing but a giggle. Yet there was a time when it could be taken not merely seriously but as the most serious thing in the world. There was a time when celebrated men would risk their reputations on such an idea.
Robert Graham had come late to the eugenics craze that had gripped the United States and Britain for fifty years from the late nineteenth century until the 1930s. Eugenics was the confluence of three rivers of Anglo-American thought: late-eighteenth-century theories about overpopulation, late-nineteenth-century Darwinism, and early-twentieth-century racial paranoia. The gloomy eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Malthus outlined the first key ideas of what would become eugenics. Fearing overpopulation, Malthus concluded that the poor’s misery must be ordained by Mother Nature. Their suffering and early death were good, Malthus said, because it prevented them from spreading their innate weakness. Any effort to ease their lot, with, say, a minimum wage, would increase misery in the long run. A century later, Social Darwinism gave a scientific framework to Malthus’s instincts. If Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” ruled birds, surely it ruled mankind, too. Mother Nature intended to cull the worst humans before they could breed, while the best of us were obliged to go forth and multiply.
It was a cousin of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, who transformed these anxious theories into a new “science” of eugenics. Galton, an eccentric and adventurer, was obsessed with measuring anything that could be measured. He amassed weather data and composed Britain’s first weather maps. He pioneered the use of fingerprinting. And in the 1860s, he set out to measure human achievement. Galton’s 1869 book, Hereditary Genius, counted and classified Britain’s most accomplished men and showed that they were very often related to one another. Successful fathers had successful sons. This, Galton claimed, proved that God-given abilities were passed from one generation to the next. (It did not concern Galton that in Victorian England, advantages of birth, wealth, and education might have given the sons of famous men a career boost.)
Galton named his new science “eugenics,” an invented word based on the Greek for “well born.” For Galton, the goal of eugenics was to increase genius. The best people must be prodded to reproduce, because their children’s natural gifts would improve Britain. Galton’s acolytes, however, immediately focused on the dark reverse of his theory: If the rich are rich because they are endowed with natural abilities, the poor must be poor because they are endowed with natural inabilities. Why were there so many poor criminals, imbeciles, drunks, epileptics, and morons? Why were the poor so shiftless? Why were the poor so . . . poor? Because they were naturally weak. “The taint is in the blood.”
The British talked plenty about eugenics, but it was can-do Americans who converted Galton’s theory into dismal practice. Americans adopted eugenics with a convert’s zeal. In the United States, eugenics quickly merged with racial anxiety: blacks and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—that is, Negroes, Jews, Papists—were threatening to overwhelm America’s white, Protestant, northern European elite.
Eugenics was a way to fight back. With vigorous American entrepreneurship, eugenicists took Galton’s philosophy, spiced it up with a dollop of Mendelian genetics, and turned it into an aggressive, impolite, and wildly successful national crusade to preserve the American “germ plasm.” In 1910, Charles Davenport opened the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman—the richest families in America supplied the funds for it. Davenport and his assistants scoured America in search of the “unfit.” They hunted for albinos, the Amish, epileptics, mental patients, and criminals and cataloged their supposed genetic weaknesses on note cards. (Eventually, the ERO would collect 750,000 of the cards.) Anthropologists wrote case studies of depraved families. The Jukeses of New York were the subject of not one but two books detailing the family’s array of criminals, lunatics, and imbeciles. Eugenicists gave new, allegedly scientific intelligence tests to immigrants at Ellis Island and discovered that 80 percent of them qualified as “feeble-minded.”
Americans—that is, white upper- and middle-class Americans—took to eugenics like a cult. University presidents, academics, congressmen, businessmen, and good society everywhere embraced the creed. Eugenics was proselytized by everyone from Ivy League professors to the KKK. By the late 1920s, 20,000 college students a year were taking eugenics courses. Eugenics assumed the trappings of a religion: Eugenicists proposed a “Decalogue of Science”—a revised, eugenic Ten Commandments. The American Eugenics Society sponsored eugenics sermon contests and issued a Eugenics Catechism:
Q: What is the most precious thing in the world?
A: The human germ plasm.
American eugenics leaders weren’t satisfied with merely identifying the unfit. Neutralizing them was the goal. The eugenicists persuaded legislatures to write laws preventing “mental defectives” from marrying. They won passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which choked off the flow of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The eugenicists flirted with euthanasia: in 1915, Chicago doctor Harry Haiselden was lionized when he refused to operate on a “defective” newborn, who quickly died. The Black Stork, a movie about (and starring) Haiselden, became a national sensation, playing for a decade.
The American eugenicists’ most important cause was sterilization. How they longed to cut! They thought practically everyone should get the knife: the “feebleminded,” alcoholics, epileptics, paupers, criminals, the insane, the weak, the deformed, the blind, the deaf, and the mute—and their extended families. Of course, most of the purportedly genetic ailments developed by eugenicists were not, in fact, genetic in origin. And even if they had been genetic, sterilization would have been a hopelessly bad cure for them. It would have taken literally thousands of generations of mass sterilization to significantly reduce the incidence of genetic diseases. But eugenicists didn’t stop to do the math.
Once surgical vasectomy was perfected at the turn of the twentieth century, the sterilizers got to work. In 1907, Indiana passed the first law allowing the forced sterilization of the feebleminded. By 1917, fifteen states had legalized eugenic sterilization. By the 1930s, a majority of states mandated the sterilization of the unfit. Daniel Kevles’s superb history In the Name of Eugenics quotes Pennsylvania governor Samuel Pennypacker, the rare public official who opposed a sterilization law. When a political crowd got rowdy on him, Pennypacker retorted, “Gentlemen, gentlemen! You forget you owe me a vote of thanks. Didn’t I veto the bill for the castration of idiots?”
Despite state laws, sterilization remained constitutionally murky. But to its opponents, it was a cruel and unusual punishment. To supporters it was an essential public health measure. In 1927, eugenicists finally pushed a case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Buck v. Bell concerned eighteen-year-old Carrie Buck, who had been committed to Virginia’s Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. The state, having declared her an imbecile, was proposing to sterilize her. Under Virginia law, three generations of a family had to be feebleminded before sterilization was permitted. Carrie’s mother, Emma, also held at the colony, was classified as feebleminded. Carrie made two defective generations. The state then set out to prove that Carrie’s seven-month-old daughter was also a moron, thus establishing a third generation. A Red Cross worker testified that the infant had “a look” that was “not quite normal” about her. That was enough for the Court, which voted 8–1 to sterilize Carrie Buck. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority decision, which likened sterilization to castration. Holmes’s words still sting: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
After Buck v. Bell, sterilization became common. Virginia, one of the most enthusiastic states, made raids into Appalachia, rounded up families of “misfit” hillbillies and dragged them down to the asylum operating room. By the end of the 1930s, more than 35,000 Americans had been forced under the knife. Another 25,000 were sterilized before the practice finally petered out in the 1960s. The most unfortunate victims of the mills were children who “voluntarily” submitted to sterilization. In War Against the Weak, Edwin Black quotes a transcript of one such child’s “consent”:
DOCTOR: Do you like movies?
PATIENT: Yes, sir.
DOCTOR: Do you like cartoons?
PATIENT: Yes, sir.
DOCTOR: You don’t mind being operated on, do you?
PATIENT: No, sir.
DOCTOR: Then you can go ahead.
Americans cheerfully exported their bloody-minded eugenic ideas to the world. German eugenicists were particularly captivated by the American notion of Nordic supremacy. Germans published textbooks based on American ideas, and Adolf Hitler read them. He wrote fan letters to leading American eugenicists, telling Madison Grant, for example, that his book The Passing of the Great Race was his “bible.”
The purported science of American eugenics helped Hitler medicalize and sanitize his hatred, making it palatable for a mass audience. When Hitler took power, he imposed draconian sterilization laws of the sort that his American teachers had only dreamed of. In only three years, the Nazis sterilized 225,000 Germans. When the war arrived, sterilization degenerated into “mercy killing”—the outright murder of tens of thousands of asylum residents. The eugenic murders were the prelude to, and inspiration for, the Holocaust. Nazi eugenic enthusiasm flourished even in the death camps, as Josef Mengele and his ilk conducted barbaric experiments on twins and other unfortunates in the name of gene science.
The Great Depression had fostered a skepticism about eugenics in the United States. Those Carnegies and Rockefellers who ruined the nation—we’re supposed to believe they’re our genetic superiors? Hitler’s crimes sealed the case against eugenics. Disgraced by the war, the sterilizers and race theorists shrank from public attention.
Even as America had been sterilizing its citizens, it had also been flirting with a more innocuous, almost goofy, form of eugenics. Since Galton, eugenics had followed two tracks. “Negative” eugenics—with all the grimness the name suggested—stopped marriages and compelled sterilization to stop the “unfit” from breeding. Negative eugenics was state-sponsored and brutal. But “positive” eugenics took a milder approach. Like Galton himself, the positive eugenicists didn’t worry much about punishing the unfit; instead they sought to increase the number of outstanding people. Philosophically, positive and negative eugenics were identical: both embraced the fiction that white Protestants were genetically superior to everyone else; both were founded on a terror of immigrants and blacks; both held that the eugenics crisis was man’s greatest challenge. And many eugenicists believed in both positive and negative tactics. But when it came to action, positive eugenics was essentially harmless.
While negative eugenics was goose-stepping toward the gas chamber, the positive eugenicists were embarking on more innocent projects. Popular textbooks instructed young women in their obligation to marry eugenically fit men. Bright young things were warned against the trendy new practice of contraception, because America needed more good, healthy babies. Teddy Roosevelt, an enthusiast for positive eugenics, declared that “the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world.” Six children, TR averred, was the right number for preventing “race suicide,” four the bare minimum.
In classic American style, the positive eugenicists turned the crusade into a competition. In 1920, the Kansas Free Fair hosted the first “Fitter Family Contest.” Twenty families entered, and trained eugenicists gave them psychiatric evaluations and intelligence tests. The winning family was paraded around the grounds like prize cattle. Soon the American Eugenics Society was sponsoring “human stock” competitions at fairs all around the country. Winners were awarded a medal on which was inscribed: “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.”
The most durable idea in positive eugenics was the dream of turning outstanding men into reproductive machines. The roots of this idea were ancient. In her excellent book Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings, Gina Maranto writes that in fifth-century B.C. Sparta, a husband could dragoon one of the city’s finest young men to impregnate his wife in order to produce “well-born children.” Socrates advised in The Republic that the state should breed its citizens like horses, assigning the best men and women to reproduce.
When eugenics took hold in Europe in the 1880s, Maranto notes, the notion of putting the finest men out to stud was revived. Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge proposed that “a very small number of males of absolute perfection” be used to father all children. Lapouge and other eugencists were mesmerized by the male reproductive capacity. A woman could bear only one child in a year, but a man might father hundreds every day. It was enough to make eugenicists giddy: Why not a whole nation of Pasteurs or Franklins? This mathematical conception of male fertility combined with a mechanical conception of female fertility: women were “receptacles” for children. The product was a potent, if rather icy, vision of the future: the genius factory.
The modern paradigm of the genius factory was laid out by J.B.S. Haldane in a weird little tract entitled Daedalus. Haldane, a Brit and Marxist, was one of the twentieth century’s great scientists; he forged the connection between Mendelian genetics and evolution. Daedalus, published in 1923, was a scientific prophecy that looked back from the year 2073. Haldane predicted that 1923’s primitive eugenics would develop into sophisticated “ectogenesis”: eventually, children would be bred in test tubes using sperm and eggs selected from only the best men and women of the age. Sexual love would wither, but at what benefit! Men would be raised to gods.
(Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World as a rebuke to Daedalus. In Huxley’s dystopia, factory breeding didn’t liberate mankind; it chilled emotion and calcified class divisions.)
For a young American scientist named Hermann Muller, Daedalus was a revelation. Muller would be the bridge between the negative eugenics and airy Daedalus-style philosophizing of the 1920s and the practical schemes of Robert Graham in the 1980s. Melancholic, attention-seeking, and brilliant, Muller was one of America’s first outstanding geneticists. As a junior researcher at the University of Texas in the 1920s, Muller proved that X-rays caused genetic mutations in fruit flies, a discovery that would win him the 1946 Nobel Prize in Medicine. In 1933, the socialist Muller moved to Leningrad to live out his ideals. In the USSR, he drafted a Daedalus-inspired eugenic manifesto, Out of the Night: A Biologist’s View of the Future.
In Out of the Night, Muller said that after America’s socialist revolution, real eugenics could remake the nation. In a postrevolutionary society, Muller argued, Americans would surely be willing to subordinate their selfish reproductive desires to the common good. A cadre of the best men would be enlisted to be fathers of all mankind. These men would possess the two most valuable human traits: intelligence and “comradeliness”—Muller’s catchall term for cooperativeness, good nature, and altruism.
In the current capitalist society, Muller conceded, attempting to breed with the best men would flop. Thanks to distorted American values, women would pick the wrong guys—don’t they always?—producing “a population tomorrow composed of the maximum number of Billy Sundays, Valentinos, Jack Dempseys, Babe Ruths, and even Al Capones.” But in a socialist utopia, women would go for Mr. Right (or, rather, Mr. Left). “It would be possible for the majority of the population to become of the innate quality of such men as Lenin, Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat Sen, Marx.” In a few generations, Muller claimed, eugenic sperm banks would enable the number of great men and women to multiply a hundredfold.
Certainly, Muller acknowledged, some people might hesitate at this fundamental change in marriage, but in the end, “how many women, in an enlightened community devoid of superstitious taboos and of sex slavery, would be eager and proud to bear and rear a child of Lenin or Darwin!”
To modern eyes, Out of the Night reads almost like a parody in its invocation of Lenin as the ideal sperm donor, its misplaced hope in socialist revolution, its preposterous underestimation of the male ego, and its view of science as a benevolent God, one that can reverse evolution with a flick of its hand. Yet it was when reading Out of the Night that I finally began to understand the Nobel sperm bank as something other than a lark. To Muller and his acolyte Robert Graham, this genius factory was nothing less than the most important project of mankind, because it was the only possible salvation of a genetically doomed world. Out of the Night was the scaffolding of the Nobel Prize sperm bank, its scientific logic, its animating zeal.
It didn’t impress Muller’s Soviet sponsors, however. He sent it with a flattering note to Stalin, who loathed it. For that and other reasons, life in the Soviet Union became impossible for Muller, and he fled back to the West lest he be purged. Eventually he settled into a professorship at the University of Indiana.
Despite the disgrace of eugenics by Nazism, the idea of the genius factory continued to entice Muller. With the 1949 discovery of how to freeze and thaw sperm, eugenic sperm banks finally seemed practical. Discarding the socialist idealism of Out of the Night, Muller concocted a new justification for the genius factory—a sales pitch for a nuclear age. Muller, whose Nobel-winning experiments had made him the world authority on radiation and mutation, argued that a buildup of atmospheric radiation was altering human DNA at an alarming rate, a rate much faster than evolution could adjust to. Humanity was dooming itself to slow genetic decline as we slowly accumulated bad mutations. The remedy: to freeze the seed of the world’s best men in lead-shielded tanks, and use their healthy DNA, instead of our radiation-weakened strands, to breed the next generation.
Muller outlined his scheme for what he called “germinal choice” in a 1961 Science magazine article. This proposed a different kind of eugenics than he had preached in Out of the Night. No longer was he calling for the state to squirt Lenin seed into women at government filling stations. Now eugenics would be private and voluntary. Families would decide for themselves whether to have mediocre children of their own or glorious ones from the genius bank.
Muller’s “germinal repositories” restored some credibility to eugenics. George Bernard Shaw sent a couple hundred dollars in support. Even Aldous Huxley liked the notion, because there was no Brave New World problem of state compulsion. Then, in spring 1963, Muller received a manuscript and a note from a man he had never heard of, Robert Graham. Graham asked Muller to write an introduction to his book, The Future of Man. Muller read the manuscript and didn’t much like it: Graham seemed to care only that sperm donors be brilliant and was indifferent to Muller’s belief that they should also be altruistic. Still, Muller suggested some changes to Graham, who took the edits graciously. More important, Muller recognized that Graham was a valuable ally. This was not merely because Graham shared Muller’s ideas about impending genetic disaster. It was because Graham shared Muller’s ideas and was rich. Muller had been talking about a genius sperm bank for a generation. In Graham, Muller found the man who could make it happen.
Graham invited Muller to California to discuss The Future of Man and the potential sperm bank. On June 5, 1963, they met at the Pasadena Sheraton and agreed to establish a sperm bank for “outstanding individuals.” Graham went along with Muller’s suggestion that the bank seek both “high intelligence and cooperativeness.” It must have been a funny encounter: the two aging men—Graham was fifty-six, Muller was seventy-three—planning solemnly to remake the world. Graham fawning over the Nobelist, whom he idolized; Muller bemused by the sycophantic millionaire. They floated names of possible donors: Muller suggested evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley (brother of Aldous), geneticist James Crow, and DNA discoverer James Watson. Graham proposed Muller himself. Graham pledged $1,000 to buy storage tanks and liquid nitrogen and another $300 per year to maintain the bank.
Graham, who had a mania for formality, meticulously recorded an account of their meeting and their decision. Graham wrote: “After more discussion of various aspects of the undertaking, Robert Graham said, ‘Let’s put it over.’ To which Hermann Muller responded: ‘Yes.’ Thereupon the two shook hands and the project was launched.”
The Sheraton pact kicked off a two-year flurry of activity. The idea of a genius sperm bank was slightly outlandish for 1963 America, but not too much so. The United States was enjoying its post-Sputnik scientific renaissance, and the egalitarianism of the late 1960s hadn’t yet arrived. To scientists, politicians, and journalists, the genius sperm bank sounded prudent, not preposterous. Graham and Muller were taken very seriously. They proposed storing the sperm at Caltech, an idea the school contemplated without ridicule. They gathered a distinguished advisory board that included psychologist Raymond Cattell, ecologist Garrett Hardin (“The Tragedy of the Commons”), and Jerome Sherman, the Arkansas professor who had perfected the process of freezing and thawing sperm in 1953. Graham incorporated a nonprofit holding company for the planned bank, the “Foundation for the Advancement of Man.” Graham and Muller quarreled about what to name the bank, each trying to compliment the other. Muller proposed the “Robert K. Graham Repository for Germinal Choice.” Graham countered with “Hermann J. Muller Repository for Germinal Choice.” Graham, the superior flatterer, won, and named it after Muller.
Graham, Muller, and their advisers passionately debated which men were sufficiently outstanding to qualify as donors. Only geniuses? Or geniuses with good politics and big hearts? Graham and Muller contemplated elaborate, government-sponsored panels that would evaluate the worthiness of would-be parents and donors. Muller urged a waiting period: sperm could be released only twenty-five years after the donor’s death, so that his accomplishments could be judged worthy by history. The bank was larded with so much bureaucracy and pompous evaluation that it was doomed from the very start.
It was also doomed because Muller and Graham were terribly mismatched. They were working for exactly opposite ends. Graham was an elitist and political conservative. Muller was an egalitarian and socialist—strange traits in a genius sperm banker. Muller had insisted that donors be both smart and cooperative in order to serve his ambition of building a more egalitarian society. But Graham cared not a jot for Muller’s interest in cooperativeness. He was going into sperm banking to prevent the very socialist utopia that Muller dreamed of. Graham just wanted to breed more Edisons, brilliant men to rule over the bovine masses. Inevitably they quarreled. In 1965, Muller asked Graham to suspend the plans for the bank: better to wait and get it right, Muller warned presciently, than start too soon, be accused of a Hitlerian master-race scheme, and poison the whole project. Graham reluctantly agreed to suspend planning. But two years later, Muller died, and Graham was free of his strictures.
Even so, Graham set aside the genius sperm bank idea for a few more years. In 1971, he officially chartered the Hermann J. Muller Repository for Germinal Choice, but then he did no more. In the early 1970s, Graham handed off day-to-day control of Armorlite to his son Robin. In 1978, he sold the eyeglasses company to 3M for more than $70 million. Graham, who owned or controlled nearly all of it, was rich beyond reason. He took his cash, plowed it into real estate and other investments, and soon found himself with a fortune of $100 million or more.
In 1976, Graham was ready for genius sperm. He had just moved from Pasadena to the ten-acre estate in Escondido. He had plenty of room for the bank and, now that he wasn’t running Armorlite, plenty of time. It was the perfect moment, and the perfect place, for him to start. It’s no accident that the three most important sperm banks in the world—Graham’s Repository for Germinal Choice, the 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 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 their first long-distance sperm mission, flying to San Francisco to collect from William Shockley and a second Nobelist. After the Nobelists took care of business—Shockley in a room at the Travelodge—Broder and Graham returned to the Oakland airport toting a white plastic container filled with liquid nitrogen and semen ampules. They had never thought about how they would get onto the plane. X-rays cause mutations, so they couldn’t run the sperm samples through the X-ray machine. But they also couldn’t conceal the samples in an X-ray-proof lead-lined container, because airline security would reject it. They managed to sneak the container through security and avoid the X-ray machine, but when they got to their plane, the crew turned them away, and no wonder: liquid-nitrogen vapor escaping from the container was swirling out in a ghostly, sinister cloud. Even in 1978, you couldn’t carry mysterious, smoking packages on airplanes. The next day, they got on another flight. But before takeoff, the pilot came back to their seats and ordered them off. They begged him, insisted that all they were carrying was a few sperm samples. He relented, and the sperm made it home safely. After that, they shipped by bus and cargo plane.
By 1980, Graham was ready. He had collected sperm from three Nobelists, including Shockley—an “adequate” supply for his first customers. He also had semen from two other revered scientists who weren’t Nobelists. According to a former Graham employee, one of those two other scientists was Graham’s acquaintance Jonas Salk.