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A Staff Report by the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board
24-Jul-2007
Dear Straight Dope:
I've heard jokes on TV shows about Nobel prize winners serving as sperm donors in the seventies. Where did this idea come from? Did it really happen? Kevin West, Los Angeles, CA
SDStaff Gfactor replies:
Joe: With the exception of Eddie and myself, whom you already know, we're going to be using aliases on this job. Under no circumstances do I want any one of you to relate to each other by your Christian names, and I don't want any talk about yourself personally. That includes where you been, your wife's name, where you might've done time, or maybe a bank you robbed in St. Petersburg. All I want you guys to talk about, if you have to, is what you're going to do. That should do it. Here are your names [pointing to each respective member] Mr. Brown, Mr. White, Mr. Blonde, Mr. Blue, Mr. Orange, and Mr. Pink.
Mr. Pink: Why am I Mr. Pink?
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Yes and no, Kevin. I know of at least one
Nobelist who donated sperm in the sense you mean. But when people talk about
Nobel Prize-winning sperm donors, they usually mean the so-called Nobel sperm
bank. One of the funniest things about it was its use of colors as code names
for donors (that and the idea of elderly scientists masturbating into cups in
motel rooms or office restrooms while a sperm bank employee waited).
However, the sperm bank didn't consist exclusively of Nobel winners, and in fact featured only a few. It boasted three Nobel
laureate donors when it opened in
1980 (two of whom jumped ship when science pariah William Shockley announced he was the
third), but donations were sought from others with high IQs. The outfit soon expanded
its catalog to include accomplished athletes. David Plotz's book The Genius
Factory (2005) traces the history of the Nobel-sperm bank, formally called
the Repository for Germinal Choice. According to its founder, Robert Graham, it
was a response to a problem of
dysgenics bright people weren't reproducing themselves. Graham, an
optometrist who made his fortune by inventing shatterproof lenses for
glasses, insisted the gene pool was being polluted by dull folk who were
surviving at increased rates because of social welfare programs and improvements
in public health. Graham published his theory in a book called The Future of
Man (1970). Anthropologist Stanley Garn reviewed it in the 1972 issue
of American Anthropologist and found little to like, calling it an "amateurish book, footnoted in a long-gone style, buttressed by
citations from the Saturday Evening Post and Reader's Digest[.]"
Garn noted that the book blamed the less intelligent for the French and
Bolshevik revolutions and Graham's warning that "they plan it here
too."
If Graham's ideas sound a bit like eugenics, that's because they are. Defenders
will say they're an example of positive
eugenics, as distinct from negative eugenics, presumably playing off the Oz-borne
notion that you can have good witches and bad.
Negative eugenics is the idea that the government should prevent the unfit from
breeding. It was popular at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1927 the Supreme
Court even approved the practice of sterilizing "imbeciles" in
Buck v. Bell, noting: "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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is
broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of
imbeciles are enough." Positive eugenics lacks
the sturm-und-drang of negative eugenics but potentially is more fun proponents think people with superior genes
should have more procreative sex, preferably with each other.
In a Slate article called "The
Better Baby Business," Plotz points out that many positive eugenics fans also
favored negative eugenics, and that the movements were based on the same racial
supremacist ideology. But he also says:
Positive eugenics was more silly than malicious in practice. In the years leading up to the Great Depression, the American Eugenics Society sponsored "Fitter Families for Future Firesides" contests at state fairs. Families were prodded and poked and quizzed to determine which was most "eugenic." (What was valued was never exactly clear. What kind of "intelligence" or "health" was being measured?) Some fairs featured a "human stock" tent placed next door to the livestock barn that promoted the "science of human husbandry."
Negative eugenics was shunned after World War II
because it had been the basis for Nazi genocide. But positive eugenics still had
a fan: scientist Hermann Muller argued that advances in health and welfare were permitting
individuals who were genetically inferior to survive and breed. Muller won a
Nobel Prize for his work on X-rays and genetic mutation. Fearing that the
mutants would soon take over, he proposed a germinal repository a seed bank to
preserve unmutated genes by freezing sperm. Muller, a socialist, even invited
Joseph Stalin to donate sperm to his planned repository.
Graham was introduced to Muller after the latter read an early draft of The
Future of Man. Impressed with Muller's work, Graham offered to make the germinal
repository a reality. Muller died in 1967, well before the bank opened its
doors. Graham originally called it the Hermann J. Muller Repository for Germinal
Choice, but Muller's widow asked Graham to take her husband's name out of the
title. Muller's widow claimed that Graham and Muller had parted ways over the
question of what characteristics ought to be more plentifully represented in the
gene pool. Muller, she said, insisted on selecting donors for characteristics like "heartfelt
loving-kindness, a joyful disposition, musical proclivities, aptness at
repartee, rapid calculation, courage or endurance, rather than solely
exceptional intelligence," said a 1980 article in Canada's Globe and
Mail.
Public response to the bank was mixed. Some scientists called it silly;
moralists fretted about it. Recent study of the human genome has revealed a
definite
genetic component to intelligence, but at the time the question was
controversial. Others felt nongenetic factors were just as important. Still
others shared Muller's concern about whether intelligence should be
singled out for genetic preservation.
The bank had problems from the start. The first was that the only person who publicly admitted
donating was
William Shockley, the father of the transistor and a
Nobel Prize winner. But Shockley was also a much-reviled
racist.
As you might imagine, a sperm bank promoting eugenics and featuring a well-known
racist to boot didn't get much favorable press. Second, the Nobel laureates
who did sign up were too old to produce useful sperm. Shockley, for example, was
70 when the repository opened. The repository ultimately produced 217 children not one
from a Nobel donor. Third, the repository didn't do the best job in screening
donors or recipients. Newspapers reported that Joyce Kowalski, the first mother
to give birth to a baby from repository sperm, had a
previous conviction for using birth records of dead children to get credit
cards and bank loans; perhaps more salient were reports that she and her
current husband had lost custody of the children she'd had with her first
husband after the first husband alleged abuse. Similarly, when David Plotz
investigated the repository, he learned of at least one donor who claimed an IQ
of 150 but had never taken an IQ test. The repository closed in 1999, two years
after Graham died.
The bank did have its good points. For one thing, it gave away its wares it
wasn't in business to make a profit. It also was the first sperm bank to offer
women a genuine choice of donors. Previously donated sperm was mostly fresh, which
meant it probably came from a medical student in the next room. Doctors tried to
get someone who looked like the woman's husband, but that's about as close as it
got to selection. The repository was the first to offer detailed descriptions of
donors, frankly elevating the sorting process above that of many conventional
hookups, which, let's face it, often comes down to "Aquarius," "BMW," and "nice
abs."
References
Akst, Daniel, "One Man's Great Expectations: The Nobel Sperm Bank, Reassessed,"
Boston Globe, June 12, 2005:
http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2005/06/12/one_mans_great_expectations/
Henig, Robin, "Seed Capital," Washington Post, June 12, 2005:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/09/AR2005060901519.html
Hollobon, Joan, "Plan to Mate Genes of Nobel Prize Winners With Very Smart Women
is Silly, Scientists Say," Globe and Mail, March 7, 1980
Howley, Kerry, "The Man Who Marketed Sperm: From Eugenicist to Entrepreneur,"
Reason, October 2005: http://reason.com/news/show/32236.html
Interview with Robert K. Graham, The Eugenics Bulletin, Winter 1983:
http://www.eugenics.net/papers/eb3.html
Matthews, Jay, "'Nobel Sperm Bank' Spawns Babies and Questions," Washington
Post, August 3, 1982
Olding, Paul, "The Genius Sperm Bank," BBC News, June 15, 2006:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5078800.stm
Plotz, David, The Genius Factory (2005); see also
http://www.thegeniusfactory.net/
Plotz, David, "The Genius Generation," Guardian, April 15,
2004:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1191592,00.html
Plotz, David, Seed: Exploring the "Nobel Prize Sperm Bank," Slate.com,
http://www.slate.com/id/100331/
Shaffer, Marjorie, "Seeds of controversy Marjorie Shaffer visits a sperm bank
claiming to store 'top-notch' genes and remains unconvinced," Financial Times,
November 16, 1995
"Sperm Bank's First Mother Once Served Time For Fraud," New York Times, July 14,
1982:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9E04E3DA1739F937A25754C0A964948260
Wieder, Sherry, "A California Sperm Bank Expounds on its Eugenic Mission"
(letter to the editor), New York Times, July 9, 1982
SDSTAFF Gfactor
Straight Dope Science Advisory Board
Staff Reports are researched and written by members of the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board, Cecil's online auxiliary. Although the SDSAB does its best, these articles are edited by Ed Zotti, not Cecil, so accuracywise you'd better keep your fingers crossed.
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