CHAPTER 10

WHO IS THE REAL DONOR CORAL?

Donor Coral’s entry in the 1985 Repository for Germinal Choice catalog.

A few weeks after Samantha Grant mailed her letter to the plastic surgeon Jeremy Taft, suggesting that he was Donor Coral, Dr. Taft sent her a reply. It was not what Samantha had expected. Taft denied that he was Alton’s father, denied that he was Donor Coral, and denied, in fact, that he had ever donated sperm. Samantha was baffled and irritated. She wondered if he was lying. After all, she had first approached him more than a year earlier: If he wasn’t Donor Coral, why had it taken him so long to deny it? And she noticed that he didn’t sign the rejection letter? Why was that? (I suggested that he could be afraid that she had a sample of Donor Coral’s handwriting to compare it to.) She reviewed all her evidence and was again struck by the coincidences. The similarities were so numerous: after matching age, personality, marital status, number and ages of children, hair and eye color, profession, geographic history, and hobbies, Samantha said, “you get down to a sample of one.”

Half kidding, she mused about hiring a private detective to investigate Jeremy Taft and thought about how to obtain one of his fingernail clippings so she could DNA-test it. But then she allowed her disappointment to settle and disperse. She slowly let go of Jeremy Taft—not because she doubted he was Coral but because there was nothing to do about it. “I shall not bother him again,” she told me—her formality made it sound definitive. If Jeremy Taft wasn’t Coral, bothering him was pointless. And even if he was Coral, it was still pointless, because he clearly didn’t want to meet his son.

This was in late 2002. Samantha and I rarely talked during the first few months of 2003. Then I made an unexpected discovery. There was one person who knew the identity of Donor Coral for sure: Julianna McKillop, who had managed the Repository in the mid-1980s and had accidentally given away Coral’s first name when Samantha had visited the bank in 1985. When Samantha had started her hunt for Coral, she had tried and failed to locate Julianna, figuring that Julianna might be willing to call Coral for her. I, too, had searched for Julianna a little bit in 2001. But the letter I had sent her had been returned, and the phone number I had for her had been disconnected. I stopped looking for her; later, another donor told me she had died.

In 2002 and 2003, I was helping a Canadian documentary company make a film about the Nobel sperm bank. In spring 2003, the film’s researcher, Derek Anderson, started looking for Julianna in the hope that she could find another donor Derek was looking for. Derek traced Julianna’s movements—from the old address in California that I had for her to Europe and back again—and finally found her. She was very much alive, and living in San Francisco.

Derek gave me her phone number, and I called her. Julianna was delighted to be found. The Repository was the greatest adventure of her life, and she loved talking about it. We chatted for a bit about Robert Graham. Then, before I even mentioned why I was calling, she asked if I knew Donor Coral. He had been her favorite donor, she said. She had lost track of him when she’d left the Repository. She had always wondered what happened to him. “Oh, he was wonderful. I loved him. He was such a lovely man. Do you know what he’s doing now? I’d love to see him again. We were so close. We were such great friends.”

I said I was looking for Coral, too. A cat-and-mouse game ensued. She didn’t want to reveal a confidence, so she wanted to make sure I wasn’t lying to weasel information out of her. To convince her of my good intentions, I told her about Samantha and Alton, and Samantha’s avid search. Julianna remembered Samantha, she was excited to aid Samantha’s quest. Julianna asked me if I knew Coral’s name. I said it was Jeremy, and that he was a doctor in Florida. That mollified her. She realized I was telling the truth. She asked if I knew Coral’s last name. It was Taft, I said.

For a moment there was silence at her end of the line. She was considering whether to tell me the truth. Then she exclaimed, “That’s not it!”

“It’s not?”

“No, it’s Jeremy Sampson, unless he changed it. Sampson is the name he always used with me. Yes, Jeremy Sampson, not Taft. Oh, how I would love to see him again. We must find him! How can we find him?”

Jeremy Sampson, not Jeremy Taft. The plastic surgeon hadn’t been lying; he had been the victim of a very unlikely series of coincidences.

Julianna said she had always thought of herself as a “middle mom” when she was at the Repository—the apex of a triangular family consisting of the birth mother, the donor, and herself. She relished the prospect of middlemoming again. We agreed to search together for Dr. Jeremy Sampson in hope of reuniting him with Samantha, his son Alton, and Julianna.

I arranged to see Julianna in San Francisco and met her one Saturday morning in her beautiful downtown apartment. She managed the building and lived there rent-free. One of Julianna’s many careers was as a painter, and she had decorated one wall of the dining room with a huge mural of her family. Practically every piece of furniture was painted in tempera—cheery, psychedelic patterns: I half expected her little dogs to be covered in swirls and paisley.

Julianna had gotten a raw deal from life but vigorously resisted self-pity: she had lost a daughter to cancer, one husband to a plane crash, another to illness. She was in her sixties, but carried herself with the energy of a younger woman; in the bathroom there was a recent photo of her skydiving. She had white hair and a too-deep tan, and a little Liz Taylor in her face. She reminded me, in fact, of a beloved, aging movie star, at once effusive and imperial.

I asked her how she had come to the Repository. “In 1981, I was a widow, I had just moved to La Jolla, and I went to a talk by [Graham’s assistant] Paul Smith at the Unitarian Church in Del Mar. Paul was running the Repository at the time. I heard him and I thought, That is the most fabulous idea I have ever heard. I asked if I could work for him, and he said, ‘Sure, I need someone to answer the phones.’ ” While Paul recruited donors and processed sperm, Julianna talked to the desperate customers who called asking for help.

Paul Smith and Julianna were a mismatched set. She thought he was slovenly and careless. His record keeping was not up to her standards, and he shed dog hair everywhere. (“I told Paul, ‘Imagine if anyone gets infected because they are inserting dog hair in their uterus!’ ”) In 1984, she said, she convinced Robert Graham to fire Smith. Unfortunately for the Repository, the donors, who had all been recruited by Paul, left with him.

Paul Smith remained a fervent devotee of genius sperm banking after Graham sacked him. He took the Repository donors and opened a rival sperm bank, Heredity Choice, which is still going today. Heredity Choice has fathered nearly three hundred kids, according to Paul, more than the Repository ever did.

Today, Paul runs Heredity Choice out of love (or obsession)—God knows there is no rational reason to do it. He and his delightful wife, Adonna, own ten acres in the California desert, way out in the Antelope Valley, where they breed border collies, Siberian huskies, and genius babies. They make a teeny bit of money from selling sperm and puppies. They spend it on dog food and collecting sperm.

When I met him in 2001, Paul was still recovering from an embarrassing setback. The last time he had let a reporter come to his home was in 1996, when a Primetime Live camera crew filmed him for a story about genius sperm banks. Paul kept his Heredity Choice samples in a trailer that had no running water. That was unsanitary enough. But Paul also showed the crew his liquid-nitrogen tanks, where he stored human sperm and dog sperm side by side. Paul didn’t understand why this was revolting. When ABC reporter Cynthia McFadden asked him about mingling the human and dog samples, Paul gave a funny, self-destructive answer: “The dog straws are twice as long [as the human ones]. I don’t think I have ever confused the two. And none of my clients has ever had puppies from the sperm I have supplied.”

California public health officials were understandably less jolly. They inspected Heredity Choice a few weeks after the camera crew’s visit and ordered Paul to shut down—the only time California had ever closed a sperm bank. Paul squabbled with them a little bit, then moved his storage tanks to Nevada, which didn’t regulate sperm banks.* ⁴

With Paul out of the way, Julianna convinced Graham to make her the manager instead. Julianna relished her new job. “I said, ‘I am going to collect sperm come hell or high water.’ ” She cruised southern California in a white Pontiac Grand Am, searching for candidates. “I went to Caltech, and I started knocking on doors. I would say, ‘I am Julianna, do you have fifteen minutes?’ and he would say, ‘Who are you?’ And I would say, ‘I am from the Repository for Germinal Choice. Have you heard of it?’ And he would say, ‘Come in and shut the door!’ ” When a donor accepted, Julianna would whip out a cup and tell him she’d return in forty-five minutes to collect it. When she got the sperm, she rushed it out to the car and, in the middle of the Caltech campus, mixed in the buffer and froze the vials.

Julianna shared Graham’s conviction that improving the gene pool was the most urgent job in the world. When FedEx spilled a Repository liquid-nitrogen tank, thawing and killing the sperm inside, Julianna built a special wooden stand to hold the tanks upright during shipment. “One drop of spilled sperm was like gold!”

Eventually, she went so far for the cause that it got her fired. When a particularly desperate client failed to conceive with frozen sperm, Julianna suggested that her then boyfriend—a successful surgeon—contribute fresh semen, since fresh was more potent than frozen. The surgeon wasn’t a donor of the Repository and hadn’t been vetted by Graham and his board. And this was also after HIV had been identified. Julianna had been dating the surgeon for two years, so she vouched for his clean blood. That didn’t protect her when Graham’s wife, Marta Ve, heard about the proposed freelancing. Julianna was fired, though she said she would do the same thing again: helping a needy woman conceive was more important than an academic concern about a donor she knew to be clean and healthy.

The story of her firing brought Julianna back to her favorite subject and mine: Donor Coral. Julianna said that she never gave the client fresh sperm from her boyfriend. Instead, she tried once more with frozen sperm. That time she used a Coral sample. It worked, because Coral never failed. “He always had so much sperm, and it was so active,” Julianna said. “And it is not just that there was so much of it, but they were all going in the right direction with one head and one tail. Jeremy’s were like a whole school of sardines!

“Oh, Jeremy was wonderful. When Jeremy came along, that made the bank. We had almost no donors then, but he came, and he was so great, and I knew: now we can really have a sperm bank.”

“How did you find him?” I asked.

He had volunteered, Julianna said. It was around 1984. “He read about it and he came to see us. I said, ‘Tell us about yourself.’ His answers were so wonderful.” Jeremy wasn’t a Nobelist. He was just a medical student, too young to have accomplished much. But he seemed just the kind of all-around stud that Graham craved—the type of man Graham’s clients were so smitten with. He said he had an IQ of 160. He was gifted at chess and mathematics. He was a superb athlete. He came from a celebrated family of scientists and musicians. He was great-looking and incredibly charming. And he had already fathered three beautiful kids. “It was all so cool,” said Julianna. The board quickly approved him as a donor.

Coral became the Repository’s star. Julianna urged applicants to select him. She did that not only because she had a plentiful supply of his seed—he was an avid donor—but also because she thought, “His genes should go all over the place.” Jeremy separated from his wife soon after he signed up for the bank, and Dr. Graham—keen to keep his prize stallion—told Julianna to make sure he was happy. She took him out to dinner on Graham’s dime and bought him bottles of wine. They struck up a great friendship. “He was such a freethinker, so creative, so caring. He reminded me of Dr. Graham, in fact.”

The Repository produced about sixty kids while she was there, she said, and half of them were Jeremy’s. She had no doubt that Jeremy would want to meet his sons Alton and Tom. “Jeremy would want to see the whole family get together. He is a family man. He would love that.”

I told Samantha about the discovery of Jeremy Sampson. She was overjoyed that the donor wasn’t the objectionable Jeremy Taft. In mid-June 2003, she and I began searching in earnest for Jeremy Sampson. Julianna left the hunt to us. Julianna couldn’t remember where Jeremy had worked or even where he had attended medical school. Still, we expected the search would be a cinch: How many Jeremy Sampsons had graduated from med school in California during the 1980s and then practiced in Florida? We examined Florida and California physician records, but there was no Jeremy, Jerry, Gerry, or Jeremiah Sampson. We found a Dr. Jeremiah Simpson, but he was way too old. I asked Julianna if she possibly misremembered the name. She doubted it, but we looked for other Jeremy Ss, anyway. I found a Jeremy Sanders who seemed promising, but Samantha saw a picture of him and knew it was the wrong guy. Samantha went to her local Mormon temple to check genealogy records. No Jeremy Sampson. She tried to cross-reference California’s marriage and physician records. No Jeremy Sampson.

Samantha called medical schools in southern California. More dead ends. I proposed digging through California divorce records, since we knew Jeremy had split from his wife in the mid-1980s. Samantha considered hiring a research assistant to help us. We had mostly been searching online, but on a lark, I suggested that Samantha call the Medical Board of California and speak to a real person. Perhaps Jeremy Sampson had accidentally been dropped from the online directory.

Samantha phoned me the next day. Jackpot. The clerk at the medical board had found Jeremy Sampson immediately. She gave Samantha a work phone number for Dr. Sampson in Florida, at the State Department of Epidemiology. “It’s great. It’s great. It’s great!” Samantha trilled to me on the phone. “This is amazing. This is him. It has got to be him. It’s him. My God, the probability of this happening is so slim. . . .”

I asked her about the state agency he worked for. Samantha sounded a little dubious. “It doesn’t sound like something someone of his accomplishments would be doing.” Then she laughed at herself. “I have this dream, this idealized vision of what he is, and I know he can’t possibly live up to it.”

Julianna and I had agreed that she would make the first contact with Jeremy. We didn’t want to spook him, which a call from me or Samantha surely would. I passed on Jeremy’s phone number to Julianna. While we waited for her to call, I did a little more research on Jeremy Sampson. Now that I knew who the right guy was, it was easy to track him in online databases. I turned up some troubling stuff. He was involved in several lawsuits. He had had some minor run-ins with the authorities.

I didn’t tell Samantha about most of this; I didn’t want to alarm her. What little I did tell her bugged her, but not too much. She was eager to believe the best of him.

She told her son that Donor Coral had been found. Alton was pleased but cautious, Samantha said. He didn’t know what to expect. He was curious about Jeremy’s family history, but he definitely didn’t want ‘some kind of weird relationship.’ ” And he definitely didn’t start talking about Jeremy Sampson as his “dad.”

Samantha and Alton wondered how to approach Jeremy. They agreed that Alton should write a letter and send a picture. First, Alton agonized over how to address it: “Dear Coral” or “Dear Jeremy” or even “Dear Mr. Sampson.”

Then he wondered what to write. “What the fuck do you say to someone like this? What do you say to him?” he asked his mom. They were both baffled. They were in a new world. There was no guidebook on how to meet your donor dad. “None of us has role models for this, it is unknown,” Samantha told me. “We are on the edge of human feelings.”

By now, Julianna had called Jeremy Sampson, and he had returned her phone message. He had been “ecstatic,” Julianna reported, and wanted to know everything about Alton. He had offered to fly to Boston immediately, but Julianna had encouraged him to hold his horses. Julianna talked to Samantha and told her more about Jeremy. What Julianna said reassured Samantha. Jeremy and Alton were very similar, to go by Julianna’s description. “He reminds me of my son in so many ways,” Samantha told me after her conversation with Julianna. According to Julianna, Samantha said, “Jeremy is independent and creative. He does not care about what others think about him. He is often quiet and thoughtful and likes to assess a situation before he speaks.” Samantha and I debated about whether we should also tell Tom that we had found his father. We decided to wait a little more. We thought we should let Jeremy adjust to one new son before springing a second son—and a grandson—on him.

In early July, a week after we found him, Jeremy called Samantha at home. They talked for almost two hours. Jeremy was fascinated with Alton. He asked lots of questions. The parallels between Alton and Jeremy’s relatives flabbergasted Samantha. Alton played piano; Jeremy’s mother had been a professional pianist. Alton was an aspiring marine biologist; Jeremy’s father and grandfather were both celebrated marine biologists. Alton got on the phone for a few minutes, too. He and Jeremy compared likes and dislikes. Jeremy liked chess; so did Alton. Jeremy loved bike riding; Alton, too. They both preferred Russian composers to Germans. They exchanged photos by e-mail right afterward: they looked a lot alike, and Jeremy swore that Alton was a dead ringer for himself at sixteen. They made plans for Jeremy to fly up to Boston in August.

Samantha gave me the download the next day. “At the end of our telephone conversation, he referred to ‘our boy.’ I loved that. I never never never thought I would hear that expression.”

Samantha was happy and stunned. Alton was dumbfounded. He told Samantha that it was “too much to grok.” He wondered what in his life belonged just to him and what was programmed into his DNA. Marine biology—maybe that was a coincidence. But what about marine biology plus piano plus chess plus bikes plus Rachmaninoff? Alton posted cryptic notes on his blog. One began, “WhatamI?”

Samantha and Julianna kept me away from Jeremy. He didn’t want to talk to a reporter yet. I wrote him a note through Samantha, assuring him that I wouldn’t reveal his identity. Finally he wrote me back a letter and an e-mail. He said he was happy to talk to me. We made a phone date. From the moment he started speaking, I got curious vibes off Jeremy. He was undeniably sweet and friendly. He was admirably curious about his sperm bank kids. But his manner was vague and his conversation meandering.

I asked him about himself. He told me he had wanted a big family ever since he was a teenager. “Some people want fame and fortune. I wanted a lot of kids.” Then he told me how many kids he had—just by his wives and girlfriends, not counting sperm banks: “about X kids with Y different women” was how he put it. To protect his identity, I can’t reveal what X and Y were, but suffice it to say that X was an extremely high number, and Y wasn’t small, either.

Jeremy had also been an avid sperm donor, he said. He had contributed to the Repository and two other banks. He was interested in meeting all of his sperm bank children. (In his letter to me, he had written, “Even a crocodile takes an interest in recognizing and protecting its offspring. Shouldn’t a human being be interested in doing more than this?”) He said he had stopped donating to sperm banks only because he had gotten distracted by real women. “I was involved with two women at the same time. There was not a lot of sperm left over.”

I asked how he had managed to qualify for the Nobel sperm bank, since he had only been a young medical student at the time. “I was interested in Mensa. I had just broken up with my first wife, so I thought maybe I should follow up to try and get an intelligent wife or girlfriend. So I was reading about Mensa, and I must have seen something about the Nobel sperm bank. I was curious and I called them.”

When the people there had interviewed him, he said, he had mentioned various distinguished ancestors and told them his IQ was 160. Had they asked for the IQ test results? No, he said.

“Is your IQ 160?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I never took an IQ test. I told them the number I thought they would want to hear.”

I knew the Repository had struggled for donors, but this was incredible. It had accepted a “genius” donor based on an invented IQ score.

Jeremy and I struck up a friendly e-mail correspondence. Despite his profligate breeding, I liked him. Partly I liked him because he was unembarrassed. He talked straightforwardly about the sexual aspect of donating sperm. He mentioned that he had even seduced women at sperm banks, recounting this disconcerting story:

“Once, when I arrived at a sperm bank, another sperm donor was arriving at the same time. He had a cast on one of his arms, so I said to myself, ‘This guy is going to need some help getting sperm into a cup.’ At that time, there were two attractive young women working at the sperm bank. I think they were college girls—premed students, most likely.

“For purposes of anonymity, let’s call them ‘Nancy’ and ‘Susan.’ The four of us were standing there, so I said to the other sperm bank donor, ‘I’ll flip a coin, if it’s heads, you get Nancy, and I get Susan to help me . . . if tails, I’ll take Nancy and you get Susan.’ Well, I flipped the coin, and I got Nancy. I took her with me into the examination room, where I was expected to masturbate to put sperm into a cup. I put my arms around her, and she blushed a beet red color and ran out of the examination room.

“I guess she was sort of innocent in matters of male sexuality. To this day, I don’t know what happened between the other donor and Susan. Maybe the cast was not a real cast for a real arm injury but simply something that he wore so that he could get a cute female sperm bank employee to help him get sperm into the cup?

“Actually, at one of the sperm banks I did end up having a lighthearted sexual affair with one of the female employees that worked at the sperm bank. I say ‘lighthearted’ because although we were good friends, we were never madly in love with one another. It was more of a casual, sporadic, on-again/off-again sort of a relationship. Let’s just say that she was very talented with her hands and I was able to donate sperm without my masturbating at all.”

After her initial euphoria about Jeremy Sampson waned, Samantha began to worry about him. Jeremy had told her immediately about his many children, figuring she would find out about them eventually. She wanted to think that his greed to breed was harmless, but the more she learned, the more it bothered her. Jeremy warned her that if Alton ever wanted to marry another sperm bank child, they should make sure to get DNA tests. This disturbed her: Did he have that many DI kids, too? Some of Jeremy’s relatives called Samantha to welcome her to the family, but also to tell her stories about him. They claimed he failed to support many of his kids financially. According to them, he had poor relationships with some of the children and no relationship with others. He was a reproductive opportunist, they said: he bred when he chose and left the parental responsibility to someone else. Samantha also learned that much of what she had been told about his family’s accomplishments had been exaggerated.

Her correspondence with Jeremy soon grew sour and suspicious. Jeremy had been a gift, but already he felt like a curse. Every time Samantha learned something else unpleasant about Jeremy, he tried to brush it off, she thought. His imperturbability alarmed her. She wondered how he could be so unbothered by his chaotic life. Samantha and Alton started researching personality disorders on the Internet: Was there a condition that would cause someone to breed so indiscriminately?

I was asking myself the same question. Jeremy was the fourth Repository donor I had met who practiced this kind of reproductive excess. I had started to think of these guys as The Inseminators. All four had volunteered for the Repository, which wasn’t surprising. If you have a compulsion to breed, of course you’d offer yourself to sperm banks. Two of the four—including Michael, the Nobelist’s son—had just gone to sperm banks but had not fathered their own kids. This seemed egomaniacal—though not irresponsible—behavior. But two of them—Jeremy and another guy—had fathered both sperm bank kids and lots of their own. Jeremy and the other guy relied on the wives and girlfriends to do the work of raising their children. They seemed to believe that their genetic contribution was gift enough for the child. It occured to me that I might have stumbled on a new disorder: Onan meets Don Quixote meets Cheaper by the Dozen. I called some psychologists who specialized in sexual pathology to ask them if they had ever heard of men behaving this way. They hadn’t and were intrigued. A couple of the psychologists characterized this compulsion to father children as an extreme form of narcissism. This kind of Darwinian self-involvement was a new phenomenon, they thought. Until recently, men were constrained in their breeding by the number of women they could seduce. No longer. Sperm banks allowed the Inseminators to reproduce without limit.

By mid-July, Samantha had begun to fear what would happen if Jeremy met Alton. Alton wasn’t too keen on the idea, either. They decided to cancel the meeting. “My main concern is to protect my son,” Samantha told me. When she recalled how Jeremy had said “our boy,” it now infuriated her. Samantha wasn’t brokenhearted. She was too angry to be brokenhearted. A so-called genius sperm bank, a four-year search, and this guy was the prize?

Samantha avoided Jeremy’s e-mails for a few weeks. Finally she told him, “We are not going to see you.”

Jeremy replied quickly, trying to provoke Samantha into changing her mind:

Dear Samantha:

The only information you have about me is hearsay from third parties, rumors, and innuendo (and perhaps some tall-tales or lies).

(Also, of course, you have my respectful and friendly e-mails to you, and we did speak once or twice on the phone, in a friendly and non-confrontational manner, if I remember correctly.)

What information are you using to base your decisions on? Did I say or do something to offend you or upset you?

When I was sixteen, my mother didn’t try to tell me who to meet with and who not to meet with. She didn’t tell me who to correspond with and who not to. . . . She never made any comments or suggestions about people that she didn’t even know firsthand.

How long do you intend to “protect” Alton? Until he’s eighteen? Until he’s twenty-two? Until he’s thirty?

After this e-mail, Jeremy proceeded as though nothing had happened, as though Samantha hadn’t rebuffed him. He offered Alton the gift of a car, his old Saab. Jeremy told me he would visit Boston in August as planned. When I mentioned that to Samantha, she was incensed. She told him she and Alton would be away, no matter when he came. Samantha also told him to stop sending them e-mail, because she and Alton didn’t want to hear from him anymore. Jeremy kept e-mailing anyway. Alton installed a block on his inbox. If Jeremy sent him mail, the autoblock bounced it with the reply “This message has been automatically deleted.” Samantha put the block on her inbox, too. Samantha, whose e-mails had been all exclamation points and glee two weeks before, now signed her messages to me “Grrr.”

Samantha told Julianna the reunion was off and that she and Alton didn’t want to meet Jeremy. Julianna defended Jeremy. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t been a great dad, she said. “When I first heard about all his kids, I said, ‘Oh darn. Why would he have all those kids?’ But then I thought of Dr. Graham and how he used to always talk about brain drain. And I heard Dr. Graham talking in my head. ‘Isn’t this what we set out to do?’ We wanted high-IQ children. We wanted babies born. Whatever it takes. ‘The smarter you are, the more children you should have,’ that’s what Dr. Graham used to say.” The kids were lucky to have Jeremy’s genes, Julianna insisted. “If women are going to have these children anyway, isn’t it better they do it with Jeremy? Isn’t it better for them to have a high-IQ father?”

I worried that Samantha blamed me for the Jeremy debacle, so I flew to Boston to see her. She and I had still never met in person. I also wanted to clear up one thing that was nagging at me: Jeremy’s accusation that Samantha was controlling her son and ordering him to avoid Jeremy. I wondered if Jeremy had hit on something. I wanted to see for myself.

Samantha collected me at the airport and drove me back to her house in Cambridge. She reminded me of a Sissy Spacek character: the sun-kissed farmer with an iron will who picks corn from sunup till past sundown, holds off a flood, and still looks good. She had beautiful skin. Her straight red-brown hair looked slightly archaic, as though she had gotten it styled in the nineteenth century. Her speech came in fits and starts. When she talked, it was a torrent. When she didn’t, she could sit happily in silence for minutes at a time.

At the house, Samantha introduced me to Alton, who was wearing khaki cargo pants and a black T-shirt. He was lanky and cute, with thick hair, deep-set blue eyes, and a big cleft chin. By the time he hit college, he would be a catch. He greeted me politely but carefully. He shared his mother’s watchfulness. Though he looked a bit like his half-brother Tom, they were opposites in manner. Tom’s emotions and self-doubt were always visible. Alton was self-contained and exuded a quiet confidence.

We started talking about Jeremy. Samantha was both laughing and bitter. “I remember Julianna showed me his application, and I remember being really impressed with all his answers. None of it was true, of course.” Almost nothing she had been told about Donor Coral actually applied to Jeremy Sampson. She pulled out his donor sheet and reviewed it.

“They said he was a ‘professional man of very high standing.’ False; he had just graduated from medical school—and not even a good one. They said he ‘has had a book published.’ Hah! The book was self-published. They said his IQ was 160. We know about that now. Julianna told me he excelled in math. Not true. She told me his sister had won international music competitions. Not true.

“And yet,” she said, staring at her son, “it was the best decision I ever made.” She grinned. “Despite Jeremy.”

Alton didn’t really want to talk about Jeremy or the Repository—he’d rather have discussed calculus—but he did it. He analyzed the Repository and his origins unemotionally, as though standing next to himself.

“They say the Repository was wrong because it practiced ‘selective breeding,’ ” he said. “I don’t understand that. That is all we do, selective breeding. When you pick a wife or a husband, that is what you do, you get to know them and make sure you like them. That is selective breeding.”

I asked him whether he wanted to meet Jeremy. I watched for any hesitation on his part, any sign that Jeremy was right and Samantha had made the decision for him. “I have no need to see the donor,” he stated flatly. (Alton never uttered Jeremy’s name while I was there; “the donor” or “the genetic donor”—that’s what he always called him.) “I don’t have some void in my life that needs to be filled. I have Daniel and my brothers.” Daniel was his father, Samantha’s ex. His “brothers” were Daniel’s much older sons from an earlier marriage, who were not genetically related to Alton at all. “In a way we are closer because we are not related. They really are my brothers.”

Are you sure you don’t want to see Jeremy? I pestered. “I’m not interested. Maybe when I am much older I would meet him, just for curiosity’s sake, but I would not be jumping for joy to do it. For now, I have no emotional need to do it. I just don’t have an emotional gap that needs filling.”

I was certain: this was Alton talking, not Samantha. He was his own self, the strong-minded son of a strong-minded mom.

It was clear that Alton was not like Tom or any of the other Nobel sperm bank kids I had talked to. I don’t know exactly what genius is, but Alton was the smartest of the Repository by far. The house was crammed with evidence of Alton’s accomplishments: stunning photographs he had taken, his piano, physics textbooks he had conquered, the schedule for his college classes, the iMac he made wiggle and shimmy. He shared his mom’s analytical intensity and gift for explanation. Robert Graham and William Shockley would have recognized Alton as a kindred spirit: he broke every question—the Iraq war, the best route for a walk, a math problem, even his own conception and birth—into its component parts, then cracked it.

Graham would have congratulated himself on Alton’s spark and declared it a tribute to Jeremy’s glorious sperm. That would have been absolutely wrong. The most striking fact about Alton was just how much he resembled his mom. Their minds leapt and skipped in the same way. They emanated the same force field of reserved stillness. As far as I could tell, Alton had nothing in common with Jeremy but eyebrows, hair, and cleft chin.

The similarity of Samantha and Alton made me reconsider other Repository families I had met. In every case, the kids bore a remarkable resemblance to their moms. Tom Legare resembled his mother, Mary, in his striving, his juggling of work and family, and his emotional directness. In other families, too, the maternal resemblance was striking: the overachieving kids of overachieving Lorraine; an elegant, wispy, dancing daughter of elegant, wispy, professional ballerina . . .

The more I thought about it, the less surprising the maternal resemblance seemed. Most of these children had been raised only by their mothers. Their “social fathers” tended to be emotionally distant, and their biological donor fathers were out of the picture. So of course they were tied tightly to their moms. The mothers were women anxious for children, so motivated that they had chosen a genius sperm bank. Not surprisingly, they had become driven mothers. They spent more time with their kids than most parents did, certainly more than I did with mine or than my wonderful parents had with me. Was it any wonder their children grew up to be like them? I got the feeling that Samantha could have taken sperm from the dumbest player on the NFL’s worst team and would still have raised a brilliant boy. Her good genes would have helped, but so would the stimulating world she created around her. Any child would have fallen under that spell.

And maybe there was also a genetic reason Alton was smart like his mom. Study after study has demonstrated the link between genes and what’s called “general intelligence”—the ability to solve problems and think rationally. In aggregate, the more intelligent the parents, the more intelligent the child. It was this connection between genes and intelligence that made Graham sure that a genius sperm bank would improve humanity. But one emerging idea in genetics calls into question the value of genius sperm. It’s called “imprinting.” This is not the “imprinting” described by animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz, which involves how animals bond to their parents. The imprinting I’m talking about concerns how genes are activated.

Here’s the theory. A child carries two sets of every gene, one from each parent. Usually both genes are active, but some “imprinted” genes seem to be different. Only one of these genes is working: a signal tells the cell that only the maternal or paternal gene should be turned on. Cambridge University’s Barry Keverne and Azim Surani have found that maternally imprinted genes (in mice, at least) are concentrated in the “executive” part of the brain—the areas that control high-level analytical thought and intelligence. Paternally imprinted genes, meanwhile, tend to be involved with the limbic system, which is the seat of emotions and primitive, instinctual behavior. In a discovery that will not surprise any big sister, Keverne and Surani found that mice created with only maternal genes had huge brains and scrawny bodies, while mice created with only paternal genes had scrawny brains and huge bodies.* ⁵

Imprinting is still a primitive theory, and no one would claim that Dad’s DNA doesn’t matter to his kid’s intelligence. But imprinting does cast a shadow over Graham’s grand plan. If the genius sperm is mostly contributing base emotions and big biceps rather than Quiz Bowl answers, who needs it? And imprinting makes Graham’s indifference to the intelligence of his maternal applicants seem shortsighted. Maybe the mothers were the ones who mattered after all. Imprinting, in fact, calls into question the eugenic trend of the sperm bank business. Why recruit Phi Beta Kappans when jolly frat boys would do just as well?

On the other hand, imprinting may help explain the explosion of the egg donor industry—fertility’s latest craze. Selling eggs has become a huge and seedy business as parents hunt for healthy, intelligent young women who’ll surrender some eggs. Middle-aged couples—acting more like Darwinian auctioneers than aspiring parents—are trolling Ivy League campuses with ever-thicker wads of cash, placing ever more demanding advertisements in The Harvard Crimson and The Stanford Daily. An intelligent young coed can now collect ten, twenty, even fifty grand if she has healthy eggs to sell. Now add imprinting to the egg mania. If parents assume that maternal genes contribute extra to their children’s intelligence, the egg bubble may get even worse.

After I read about imprinting, I sent Samantha some newspaper articles about it. She was delighted. It was a great relief to her. It meant that Jeremy was secondary—that his genes mattered less to Alton’s intellectual development than hers. She forwarded the articles to him without a word of comment.

A few months later, she heard from him again. Jeremy, on a visit to Boston to see his sister, showed up unannounced at Samantha and Alton’s house. He wanted to meet Alton. Samantha asked Alton if he wanted to come down to see Jeremy. Alton said no. Samantha asked Jeremy to go away, and he left without even seeing his biological son. By the end of 2003, Samantha and Alton had washed Jeremy out of their lives. Samantha and I talked less, and when we did, it was more often about her job, my job, or the war. The adventure had become a misadventure.

Samantha had lost the crusading enthusiasm she had when we first met. She had believed adamantly that DI children had a right to know their donor fathers. In our earliest phone conversations, she had grilled me about my attitude toward that question. I had explained that I thought kids did have a moral right to know but that you couldn’t force donors to have a relationship with their offspring, merely to acknowledge them. This satisfied her, but again and again she had reminded me that we were on a crusade, not merely to find Donor Coral but to show the world the importance of children’s genetic rights. The reality of Jeremy had deflated this.

“My thoughts have clarified as the result of the adventures of the past few months. We should not place great stock in meeting donors and half-siblings,” she wrote me glumly. “One can develop a friendship with DI relatives, but a familial relationship is unlikely.

One of Jeremy’s Repository sons, Alton, wanted nothing to do with him. But what about the other son? What about Tom? Unlike Alton, Tom had longed to find his donor dad. Did he still want to meet Donor Coral? Before Samantha’s relationship with Jeremy went south, she and I agreed that it was time to tell Tom the truth. He had been kept in the dark long enough. I called him on his cell phone. I reached his voice mail. It was a new message:

Hi, you have reached my answering machine, because I have amnesia and I feel stupid talking to people I don’t remember. So at the sound of the beep, leave my name and please tell me something about myself.

I was not quick enough to leave the right message, which would have been “Tom, I have your name: It’s ‘Sampson.’ Instead I just said, “Call me. I have some news.”