CHAPTER 13

SPERMICIDE

The Nobel sperm bank celebrity grows up: Doron Blake, age seventeen. Dave Luchansky/ Getty Images

One question still puzzled me: Why had the Repository for Germinal Choice closed in 1999? I couldn’t figure it out. Robert Graham had considered the sperm bank the most important work of his life, and he had intended it to survive him. Yet two years after his death in 1997, the bank was finished. Surely Graham hadn’t simply abandoned it. What had happened?

I finally learned the whole story from Anita Neff, the Repository’s final manager. Anita had been a shadowy presence throughout my research. Lots of the donors I met had been recruited by her. She had played the heavy in the Donor White saga, cutting the communication between Beth and Roger in 1997. But no one knew what had become of her. One donor thought she had moved to Italy. Another said she was in Norway. For two years, I hunted her unsuccessfully. Then, in 2003, the documentary researcher Derek Anderson found Anita in southern California. After several years overseas, she had settled just a few miles from the Repository’s old office in Escondido. After some cordial e-mails, Anita agreed to meet me on my next trip out west.

We made a date for brunch at a Del Mar mall. There was no one who looked remotely like a former sperm bank manager at our meeting point. Finally a woman approached me and said, “I’m Anita. Are you David?” Anita was stunning. She was wearing a black skirt, slit to reveal all but a few northern inches of her excellent legs, black lace stockings, a tight black top with a fur collar and fur wristbands, and an elegant, wide-brimmed black hat. She was forty-five years old, but she looked thirty. (When I saw her, I understood why donors had spoken of her with such, um, reverence. One had remembered with evident delight how “she was motivation when I was doing my donations, if you know what I mean.” Not surprisingly, she had been a superb recruiter.)

Anita had not spoken publicly about the Repository since she had left it, but she was glad to have the chance to talk. She was direct and funny. One reason I particularly liked her was that she was not a eugenics zealot, unlike others who had worked for Graham. Quite the contrary. Anita was the ninth of eleven children, and she didn’t have any kids herself; she did not spend her days fretting about the shortage of children in the world. She said she had ended up at the Repository by chance. In 1993, when she was an HIV and pregnancy counselor, she had answered a classified ad for the Repository.

She had never heard of the sperm bank, but Graham had charmed her during the interview. Anita didn’t care about Graham’s genetic crusade, but she didn’t see anything wrong with the bank’s mission, either. And she was really excited about the challenge of repairing the bank. When she arrived in 1993, the vaunted Nobel Prize sperm bank was a mess. Under a series of managers in the 1980s and early 1990s—none of them technicians or scientists—the bank had slid into a sorry decline. It had managed to spawn a lot of kids, but its methods were haphazard, to put it mildly. Graham, for example, had shamefully loosened his standards for donors. Graham had begun with the intention of recruiting only the best men in the world. But by the mid-1980s, despite occasional catches such as Donor White and Donor Fuchsia, he and his managers were accepting almost any man who walked in the door. A series of volunteer donors, moderately accomplished egotists such as Jeremy, had snowed Graham. They had sold him on their brilliance, sometimes lying to him about their IQ, athletic achievements, musical talents, and professional achievements (lies that were then repeated in the donor catalogs). Forget about Nobel laureates; the Nobel sperm bank was taking men you wouldn’t wish on your ex-girlfriend. (Graham had more quixotic ambitions, too: he tried to enlist Prince Philip of England as a donor, despite the absence of evidence that the prince has ever engaged in any kind of cognitive activity. And according to Sylvia Nasr’s A Beautiful Mind, schizophrenic mathematician John Forbes Nash also considered donating his genius sperm, though I found no evidence that Graham had contacted him.)

It seemed to me that the Nobel sperm bank ultimately became a kind of scam. Its reputation for Nobelists and geniuses fooled mothers into thinking they were getting a better product than they were. They expected Nobelists, and ended up with men like Jeremy. But the decline in quality was invisible to customers. The catalogs remained grandiose, duping women into thinking that the donors of 1988 were the same kind of men as the Nobel donors of 1980.

The Repository had other dubious practices. Most sperm banks limited themselves to donors under forty, because older men’s sperm suffer from more genetic abnormalities. Not the Repository. Donor White, for example, was over fifty when he was recruited and nearly sixty when he stopped giving. Graham also played loose with child limits. He originally restricted donors to twenty offspring, to reduce the possibility of accidental incest. But when Graham found himself short of semen—a regular problem—he relied repeatedly on his most prolific donors. One donor fathered twenty-five kids, according to Anita. I suspect gold medalist Donor Fuchsia fathered even more than that. (Why? Because of the thirty kids I know, eight are from Fuchsia. That’s 27 percent of them. My sample could be statistically anomalous. If it’s not, that suggests that more than fifty of the bank’s two-hundred-odd kids came from Donor Fuchsia.)

Anita said she had whipped the Repository into shape. She had insisted that it follow the American Association of Tissue Banks’ guidelines for sperm banks. That meant declining donors who were over forty or had fathered too many children. She tightened the application process. She added new blood tests and disease screenings. She flew donors to San Diego for a brutal physical. Before Anita, few prospective donors had been rejected on health grounds. Under Anita, that happened all the time. Because donors did their business at home, she DNA-tested all sperm samples to make sure they were sending their own seed. Anita brought truth in advertising to the Repository. The catalogs were toned down; donors’ accomplishments were not exaggerated. If a donor had scored only 420 on the verbal section of his GREs, his listing said so. Anita reorganized the records after discovering to her horror that the bank had reused color identification codes (two Donor Oranges!). Anita also cracked down on the ad hoc arrangements some donors had struck with previous managers. One donor, for example, intended to pay for his offspring’s college educations. Anita said no. “That was making the bank play a role it was not supposed to play. It was causing people to choose their donor based on the hope of getting something out of him. That was not what Dr. Graham wanted.”

Anita and Graham shared recruiting duties. Anita pursued different kinds of men than her boss did. Graham still hungered after great brains, even if he couldn’t find them. Anita prioritized health over genius, making sure every man she found had a stellar medical history. And she broadened the donor pool. Graham let her “recruit highly qualified people that he would never have recruited.” In other words, nonwhite people. She enlisted a Samoan and a Native American. (Anita thought Graham was not quite the racist he was made out to be. “He was willing to be convinced that the world was full of good people of high capacity, and they don’t all have to be German. He was willing not to always hold on to the past.”)

The Repository sustained its popularity during the early and mid-1990s. The waiting list reached eighteen months, because there were never enough donors. Usually, Anita could supply only fifteen women at a time with sperm. California Cryobank, by contrast, could supply hundreds of customers at once. Demand at the Repository remained strong even when Graham started charging for sperm. In the mid-1990s, the bank collected a $3,500 flat fee per client, a lot more than other banks. Ever the economic rationalist, Graham had concluded that customers would value his product more if they had to pay for it.

The press remained enthralled with the Nobel sperm bank, in a delighted and revolted way. When William Shockley died of prostate cancer in 1989—scorned, loathed, and bitter—his obituaries noted, contemptuously, that he had been the Nobel Prize sperm bank’s flagship donor. In 1991, the Annals of Improbable Research awarded Graham its first Ig Nobel Prize in Biology. Even so, newspaper and TV reporters streamed to Escondido to interview Graham and Anita. They clamored to know whether the dream had come true. Were the kids special? Were they “wonder kids,” “designer babies,” “superchildren”?

Graham didn’t know the answer. He had intended to use his Repository kids as lab rats in scientific studies of their abilities, but that plan, like all his others, had not turned out as he hoped. In 1992, he had mailed an initial survey to all the parents, asking for basic information: How old were their children? How well were they doing compared to other kids? Any IQ test results yet? Practically no one had returned the survey. The parents had rarely shared Graham’s eugenics bent to start with, and they cared even less once their babies were born. Graham was disappointed that he would never prove that his sperm had produced better children.

Graham was eighty-six by the time Anita met him but still spry. A bout with cancer slowed him down a little and he wore hearing aids, but he was otherwise the same polite, energetic, flirty man he had been thirty years earlier. He would swim at his pool in the morning, then visit the Repository for an hour in the afternoon. He showed off to Anita—in a cute way, she thought. He was writing his memoir, and he wanted to include lots of pictures of himself as a young man, including several in scanty bathing suits, because “he was so proud of his physique.” Graham loved being around pretty women, but he was gentlemanly, not lecherous. He liked to call Anita “my Varga Girl.” (One donor recalled that when the eighty-eight-year-old Graham had come to recruit him, he had asked Graham if his wife, Marta, missed him while he was away. Graham had looked slyly at the donor, proudly hitched up his pants, and proclaimed, “Well, I took care of that before I came out here.”)

In the 1990s, Graham accumulated lifetime achievement awards from ophthalmologic and optometric societies. He accepted the prizes graciously—he was incapable of doing anything ungraciously—but they meant nothing to him. He was still a crusader for his real cause, Anita said. “When he was probably ninety, he was getting a big award from an ophthalmology association, and I asked him how he felt about it. He said, ‘I really don’t care. That’s the past. I care about the future, about what I am going to do in the next ten years.’ ”

Even in his late eighties, Graham was leafing through Who’s Who looking for donors, sponsoring a conference on human genetic engineering at UCLA, eagerly granting TV interviews about the Repository, happily trekking cross-country to flatter men one third his age into becoming donors.

Graham was desperate for the Repository to continue after his death, Anita said, but he had a problem: none of his children was interested in it. In fact, they hated it. Who could blame them? Graham sometimes seemed prouder of his sperm bank offspring than of some of his own children. Graham’s wife had no particular fondness for the bank, either, Anita said. She tolerated it because she loved her husband.

Meanwhile, the Repository was bleeding cash. Graham had hoped that customer fees would enable the bank to break even. But the fees were never remotely enough. According to its tax returns, the Repository spent about $170,000 a year to collect and distribute sperm but garnered only $20,000 from customer fees, $40,000 in a good year. The difference had to come from somewhere: namely, Graham’s pocket. He shelled out $100,000 or more every year to keep the bank, going. As long as he lived, that was fine—he had millions to spare. But what about when he died?

In 1994, Graham thought he had found the perfect solution: an Ohio magnate named Floyd Kimble. A World War II veteran, Kimble had settled in eastern Ohio after the war and thrived in all kinds of businesses. He drilled gas wells; mined limestone, coal, and clay; operated a landfill; manufactured cement mixers; farmed; and more. He succeeded at everything. His biggest score came in 1988, when he won a $600 million lawsuit over natural gas contracts. It’s not clear how much of that he was actually paid, but the next year, he and his wife, Doris, set aside $30 million to start the Foundation for the Continuity of Man. The name was a conscious echo of Robert Graham’s Foundation for the Advancement of Man.

Kimble was a Graham acolyte, but he was cruder in every way than Graham. Kimble’s manner was rougher; his eugenic ideas were less sophisticated; his prejudice was more overt. Still, the two men had plenty in common: they were self-made millionaires from rural backgrounds, and they shared a can-do spirit and the conviction that our genes were going to hell.

Kimble had slightly different goals than Graham. His ideas were a queer stew of Graham’s eugenic alarmism and his own apocalyptic environmentalism. As a farmer, Kimble believed that hybridization was weakening plants even though it increased crop yields. Kimble theorized that hybridization had weakened humanity in the same way: Too many unfit humans were being born, and they were breeding too much. Kimble also dreaded a global environmental catastrophe. His solution to all this: rather than distributing great sperm à la Graham, Kimble decided he would preserve it for the future in a remote, radiation-proof vault. Hence, the Foundation for the Continuity of Man. In 1991, Kimble bought a real bank building in suitably far-flung Spokane, Washington, and set about stocking the vault with human semen. He also planned a separate warehouse for plant seeds and animal semen.

Kimble contacted Graham to discuss the genetic crisis and the Repository, and they struck up a friendship. Through his connection with Graham, Kimble met the former Repository manager Dora Vaux and hired her to run his bank. Vaux solicited Repository donors to contribute to Kimble’s storage bank as well. (Michael the Nobelist’s son says he gave to both banks.) Kimble also invited fifty-six members of the Norwegian Olympic team to donate, though none did. For Kimble, Norwegian Olympians were as good as it got. In 1996, Vaux told a reporter that “racial purity” was a goal of Kimble’s bank, that she was collecting only from “high-achieving white men.” Vaux also said that if sperm from black men were ever collected, it would be stored separately from the white sperm.

Graham realized that Kimble could ensure the future of the Nobel sperm bank. He was the perfect heir to it. He was twenty years younger than Graham, he had plenty of money, and he believed in genius sperm banking. Kimble was certainly a better bet than Graham’s own family, which would shut the bank the first chance they got. According to Anita, Graham and Kimble struck a handshake deal. Kimble replaced Graham as the cash cow and agreed to continue the Repository when Graham died. During the last week of 1994, Kimble donated $400,000 to Graham’s foundation, enough to run the Repository for three years. When that money ran out, Kimble supplied another $100,000.

Despite Kimble’s cash, Graham still got to supervise the Repository, and he had every intention of doing that for years. In June 1996, he celebrated his ninetieth birthday. In February 1997, Graham traveled by himself to Seattle for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “He was on a recruiting trip, of course,” said Anita. “He would go to meetings like that to walk the halls,” scouting for good-looking young hotshots. On February 13, Graham fell in the hotel bathtub, hit his head, and drowned. His New York Times obituary gave equal billing to his invention of shatterproof eyeglasses and his Nobel sperm bank. Time magazine marked his death with an item in its “Milestones” section. (A couple of items below, “Milestones” also noted that week’s conviction of biologist Carleton Gajdusek for child molestation. Gajdusek was a Nobel Prize winner. I wonder if Graham had ever asked Gajdusek to donate his Nobel sperm. What would he have made of Gajdusek’s crime? Would he still have coveted Gajdusek’s Nobel seed?)

About three hundred people attended Graham’s funeral at Emmanuel Faith Community Church in Escondido. Soon after, Anita mailed a letter to the donors announcing Graham’s passing. “We wanted to send you this personal note since you are a very special part of his dream. As per Dr. Graham’s wishes we will continue to operate the Repository in the same manner as in the past.”

But of course it wasn’t the same. Graham’s will didn’t mention the bank, but Floyd Kimble, as expected, assumed responsibility for it. He provided cash when Anita needed it. But after a slow year, Anita was ready to move on. She resigned and moved to Europe with her husband. Kimble hired no permanent manager to replace her. Then, in September 1998, Kimble died suddenly at age seventy.

Kimble’s death sealed the fate of the Repository. He apparently had made no provision for the bank in his will. With Anita’s departure, there was no one to collect and distribute sperm. And with Kimble’s death, there was no one to pay for it. In early 1999, Robert Graham’s widow, Marta, Floyd Kimble’s son, Eric, and medical director Frank Andersen decided to shut the Repository for Germinal Choice. After nineteen years and 215 children—not one of them a Nobel baby—the Nobel Prize sperm bank would go out of business.

On April 29, 1999, Andersen announced the shutdown in a letter to donors. He told them that he was arranging for “proper clinical disposal” of the stored sperm. If donors wished to collect their samples for “personal use,” he would try to arrange it, but “you should know before considering such a course that it may be difficult or impossible to find a facility to accept and store the specimens, and that the cost of such an effort would be considerable.”

Donor White tried to save the bank, in his own unobtrusive way. He thought if the shutdown were publicized, some rich man might step in to save it. Roger leaked Andersen’s letter to a San Diego TV station, but it refused to cover the story unless he appeared on camera. Careful of his privacy, he wouldn’t. Instead Roger e-mailed Logan Jenkins, a San Diego Union-Tribune columnist, telling him, “I have the feeling that if Dr. Graham were still alive, he would not wish to see his work ended in the manner proposed.” Jenkins did write a column. It ever so slightly regretted the bank’s demise, but Jenkins also did what journalists had always done to the bank—mocked it: “The world’s most notorious sperm bank is undergoing a radical vasectomy. The Repository for Germinal Choice, the mercilessly teased brainchild of Dr. Robert Graham, is tying its tubes after helping produce a litter of 215 genetically boosted babies.” So the Nobel Prize sperm bank died as it had lived, half science, half comedy. Practically every newspaper and TV station in the United States had covered the bank when it opened. Jenkins’s column was the only thing written about it when it closed.

No sperm sugar daddy stepped forward to rescue the bank. The shutdown proceeded as planned. None of the donors requested his sperm back. Marta Graham asked Steve Broder, Graham’s original technician, if he wanted to buy any of the Repository’s equipment for use at California Cryobank. Broder didn’t, but he volunteered to help supervise the closing. One morning in mid-June, Broder and Marta Graham descended on the Escondido office for the final time. The Repository’s records—just a bunch of file folders—had already been entrusted to the Repository’s office manager. (I don’t know where she keeps them; she never answered my queries.) A medical waste company arrived. The liquid-nitrogen vats, the background of hundreds of pictures of Robert Graham clouded in vapor, were emptied and carted away.

Next, spermicide. The frozen vials—once so precious that they had been double-locked and shielded by lead, that reporters had begged for a glance at them, that women had traveled around the globe to get their hands on them—were dumped unceremoniously in red biowaste bags and driven off to the incinerator. Dr. Graham’s dream began in ice and ended in fire.

Neff wasn’t nostalgic when she recounted the end of the bank. “Sperm banking will be a blip in history,” she said. The Nobel sperm bank, she implied, would be a blip on that blip. And in some ways, she is clearly right. The Repository for Germinal Choice pioneered sperm banking but ended up in a fertility cul-de-sac. Other sperm banks took Graham’s best ideas—donor choice, donor testing, and high-achieving donors—and did them better. They offered more choice, more testing, more men. And they managed to do so without Graham’s peculiar eugenics theories, implicit racism, and distaste for single women and lesbians. The Repository died because no one needed it anymore.

But the dream the Repository represented is more alive than ever. Since my two children were born, I have been thrust into the world of yuppie parental ambition. Child making and child rearing have become full-contact sports. Parents start enriching their children in the womb and never stop. The amount of parental involvement in children’s lives is scary. We dose them with Ritalin and antidepressants in the cradle, use Machiavellian maneuvers to enroll them in honors classes and select soccer teams. We live by a competitive creed: We must give our children any edge we can.

For the moment, we seek advantage through drugs and classes and tutors, but we will use genes as soon as we can. The Repository’s notion—that good sperm will make good children—is too crude for our age,* ⁶ but more sophisticated science is coming, advancing Graham’s dream to the twenty-first century. The first hints of the new world are already here. A technique called “preimplantation genetic diagnosis” (PGD) allows a doctor to run genetic tests on eight-celled embryos created by IVF. The doctor and parents can then select the most genetically fit embryo for implantation in the womb. At the moment, PGD can screen for only a few genetic diseases (as well as for gender), so it’s used chiefly to help parents protect their kids from dread ailments such as cystic fibrosis. But eventually PGD will be able to tag genes associated with musical ability, blue eyes, or intelligence. When that happens, most parents will still reproduce the old-fashioned way. But the few who really care about beating Mother Nature—the ones who wrote to Dr. Graham in 1980 and who shop for egg donors at Harvard today—will be lining up for PGD and hoping for a prodigy. The old-time eugenics of Graham and Shockley and Galton is dead. No one cares about the national “germ plasm” anymore. But private eugenics has arrived to replace it. If we can get better genes for our own kids, many of us will do so. Just like the first Nobel sperm bank customers, we are captive to the great delusion that we can control our children, that we can make them what we want them to be, rather than what they are.

The question I am most often asked is: Did the Nobel sperm bank work? By which questioners mean: Did it make superkids?

I don’t have a simple answer. Of the 215 children of the Nobel sperm bank, I know of 30, aged six to twenty-two. I’ve met some of them, talked to many of them, and e-mailed with others. In some cases, I have only talked to their parents about them. My sample is not random; these are families that contacted me. They are probably exceptional in all kinds of ways. Most of them, for example, are single-mother families. Intact families tend to be less open about their DI secrets, partly to guard the relationship between father and children. I also suspect that my sample families are more satisfied with the Repository, because people are usually more willing to talk to reporters about things they are happy about. Still, let me try to sum the children up.

A few of them—Alton Grant, for example—have brilliant minds. A few others have wonderful physical talents: there are a couple of superb dancers and at least one amazing singer. Of the rest, most are very good if not great students. Several kids perform below average in school. Almost all are in excellent health, but one boy in the group is autistic and one girl suffers from a debilitating muscle disease. In short, they are certainly above average as a group, but the range is very wide.

Is this a tribute to Robert Graham and his great sperm? I don’t know, but I doubt it. These are fortunate children: they come from prosperous homes—middle class and up—and they have exceptionally attentive mothers. Most children would thrive in such surroundings. Measuring what the sperm donor contributed is simply impossible. Yes, the smartest of the kids had smart donors, but they also have smart mothers, and they have been raised in intellectually challenging environments. The most physically gifted had physically gifted donors, but they also have physically gifted mothers, and their parents have cultivated their talents. So the question of what the Repository gave its children is unanswerable. Though I suppose it could be answered this way: of all the parents I talked to, only one regretted using the Repository. The Nobel sperm bank may not have met the world’s expectations, but it met the expectations of those who mattered most: its customers.

The children of the Repository for Germinal Choice have certainly not become an elite, celebrated cadre, as Graham hoped in his most ambitious moments. All the children lead very private lives—except one: the prodigious Doron Blake, the Repository’s second child and its most celebrated public legacy. Doron’s early achievements—computers at two, Hamlet at five, IQ of 180—and his mother’s publicity seeking made him the bank’s adorable mascot. In 1995, when Doron had reached the venerable age of thirteen, Graham declared, “When Doron Blake is old enough, I’m going to ask him to become a sperm donor himself at the Repository.” But within two years, Graham was dead. By the time Doron turned eighteen in 2000, the bank was gone.

The Repository died, but the fascination with Doron lived on. Reporters kept calling him to find out how Graham’s experiment had turned out. As a prodigy and as practically the only Repository child who talked openly to the press, Doron was a precious commodity. He turned the media interest into a nice income stream. Any reporter who wanted to talk to him had to pay. Before he turned eighteen, his mom, Afton, dunned reporters and deposited the proceeds in a college fund. Now that he is an adult, Doron has taken over the business, asking $500 and more per interview. He uses the cash to clear college loans, buy books, pay for vacation travel. Doron told me in 2001 that he had performed his sperm-and-pony show for more than a hundred reporters, from Japanese TV crews to British tabloid reporters to 60 Minutes.* ⁷

I had read countless articles about Doron as a tyke, all filled with his quick wit and his insufferable boasting. I had also seen how his mother had made a spectacle of him, sharing intimate facts about his life with millions of readers and viewers. I wanted to know what Doron had become as an adult and what it was like to be the Repository’s symbol. In spring 2001, I tracked him down at Reed College, where he was an eighteen-year-old finishing his freshman year. After I had left several messages on his sitar-twanging answering machine, we finally talked.

“I was [Robert Graham’s] emblem. I was the boy with the high IQ who was not screwed up. I was his ideal result.”

I had seen pictures of Doron: he was a goateed, gentle-looking hippie. His voice, however, was suffused with ennui and bitterness. The reason for the ennui was obvious: he had delivered this spiel many times before, and he was sick of it. (Doron, who usually stuttered, didn’t when he was talking about sperm. Maybe he was too well rehearsed.) But the bitterness came from somewhere else. He said “ideal result” with derision. When Doron was a boy and his mother, Afton, was thrusting him in front of the cameras, he was the hero of the Nobel sperm bank. Now that he was an adult and controlled his story, he was giving it a different ending.

“It was a screwed-up idea, making genius people,” he said. “The fact that I have a huge IQ does not make me a person who is good or happy. People come expecting me to have all these achievements under my belt, and I don’t. I have not done anything that special.

“I don’t think being intelligent is what makes a person. What makes a person is being raised in a loving family with loving parents who don’t pressure them. If I was born with an IQ of 100 and not 180, I could do just as much with my life. I don’t think you can breed for good people.”

Both Afton Blake and Doron insist that she never pressured him into his youthful achievements. She was an indulgent mother, but she wasn’t a stage mom. Doron discovered by himself that he was a math prodigy and a wonderful musician. He shone at a Los Angeles school for the gifted, then won a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, one of the best high schools in the nation.

But if Afton didn’t coerce Doron into achieving, she did something worse. She turned her son’s life into The Truman Show. British tabloid journalists visited his dorm. His love life was bandied about in print; also his difficulty making friends. His accomplishments were national news. Doron loved his mom enormously, but he had come to realize how his public childhood had twisted his life. Doron’s story was supposed to have been about nature, about his Nobel-sperm-bank-derived genetic gifts. But as Doron told it, he made it clear that he thought it was about nurture. “It was not the best thing for me to grow up in the spotlight. This is something I realized recently. I never enjoyed the media appearances, and I did not really understand the effects on me till now,” he said.

“I have always been a shy spend-time-alone kind of person. Being in the public has made me very uncomfortable. It is one reason why now I feel that people are not going to like me. I always feel like people are examining me and probing me. It is much better for kids to grow up in a safe environment. It would have been much better if Mom had not had me microprobed.

“Most of being a prodigy was negative,” he continued. “People have always been saying ‘prodigy sperm child’ all my life. But I am not that wonderful at anything. You feel a lot of pressure because you don’t want to let people down, or you don’t really feel free to be what you want to be.

“Mom did not mean to, but she put a burden on me by making me feel like someone special,” he once said. “I’m always hearing that I’m special. I don’t want to be special.”

Doron told me he believed he was “smart” in the sense that he processed information quickly. He did think that was genetic. He also thought it didn’t matter. In fact, he seemed to be going out of his way to avoid using that intelligence. Since he’d started college, he had abandoned math and science, the subjects he excelled at. He was intending to major in comparative religion. He was also passionate about music—fluent on piano, guitar, and sitar—but apprehensive about playing in public. The only career he could imagine for himself was teaching at his old high school, Phillips Exeter—“where brilliant kids have brilliant thoughts.” Maybe this was just the loneliness of freshman year speaking. Still, his hope of a return to Exeter seemed poignant. He wanted to go back in the place where he had been safest and happiest.

Doron didn’t exactly resent his sperm bank birth. One of the first things he said to me, in fact, was that the reason he did interviews was that he wanted to show people that sperm bank kids were just like everyone else. Still, he was remarkably uncurious about his donor. He said the BBC had approached him a couple of years earlier and told him it had figured out the identity of Donor Red #28, his father. They asked Doron if he wanted to meet him. Doron said he told them that he would meet him but didn’t really care. How little did this matter to him? Doron claimed, and I believe him, that he had forgotten Red 28’s name after the BBC had told him. “I think it was John, and he was a computer scientist of some sort.

“Genes have never been important to me. Family is the people you love. I feel a lot closer to people who are not my blood than to those who are. Those blood ties have never been enough to hold me ever. [The donor] is not part of my life. He has no place in my life whatsoever. He is no more than a stranger.”

It is hard to imagine what Robert Graham would have made of his favorite offspring, now that he was all grown up. Graham prized science and scorned emotion. He hoped his sperm bank kids would build computers and synthesize medicines. Doron, once the math whiz, had disavowed hard science for the softest of studies, human spirituality. Graham had dismissed his own youthful musical career as a “waste”; Doron lived through his music. Graham sought athletic, macho donors. Doron despised sports and couldn’t stand manly men. Graham hoped his sperm bank kids would lead the world. Doron’s ambition was to teach high school. Doron was everything that Graham dreamed of—hyperarticulate, smart, brutally honest—yet he rejected all that Graham preached about genetics and intelligence. The power of Doron’s brain vindicated Graham. The feeling in Doron’s heart rejected him.