Superkids?

A sperm bank for Nobelists

Robert K. Graham, 74, a wealthy California businessman, calls it a "moderately expensive hobby." Fairly interesting too. Graham collects sperm from Nobel-prizewinning scientists--five so far --and offers it to young women who have high IQs. According to the Los Angeles Times, which broke the story last week, Graham has shipped frozen sperm to several unidentified women, and three of them--all on the East Coast--are pregnant. Says he: "This is just the beginning."

Graham, a developer of plastic lenses for eyeglasses, was a friend of the late Nobel Physiologist Hermann J. Muller, who advocated improving the genetic stock of the human race by freezing gifted men's sperm for later insemination of bright women. Converted to Muller's view, Graham several years ago began writing to Nobel laureates, asking for sperm donations. Five said yes, and Graham made collections in the San Francisco and San Diego areas for his subterranean sperm bank--the Hermann J. Muller Repository for Germinal Choice--built on his ten-acre estate in Escondido, Calif.

A member of Mensa, a group of 33,000 people who have IQ scores in the top 2%, Graham first revealed his project last summer in an interview published in the Mensa Bulletin. He was seeking to place his Nobel sperm with bright women who were healthy, under 35 and preferably married to a sterile man. Two dozen wom en applied, and those who were chosen received physical descriptions of the anonymous Nobel donors--plus Graham's own assessments. "A very famous scientist," he wrote on the description of one of the five available mail-order fathers (to whom he has assigned numbers 10 through 14), "a mover and a shaker, almost a superman." Replied one of the women: "I'm very excited about this ... I'm tentatively going to select No. 13 because he's the youngest of the donors and has the highest IQ." As a condition for receiving Nobel sperm, the applicants agreed to send Graham regular reports on the pregnancy and, after birth, on the child's health and IQ.

So far only one of the sperm donors has revealed himself to the press: Laureate William Shockley (Physics, 1956), whose genetics opinions are regularly attacked as racist. Says he: "I don't regard myself as a perfect human being or the ideal candidate, but I am endorsing Graham's concept of increasing the people at the top of the population." Steve Broder, who directs a Southern California sperm bank called Cryobank and is a former adviser to Graham, says he saw "three or maybe four" Nobelists donating to the depository. "I see nothing extraordinary in all this," he adds. "It's quite normal for potential mothers to come in and ask for sperm with a high IQ."

Many Nobel winners are taking a dim view of Graham's project. Stanford's Burton Richter (Physics, 1976) reports that his students are beginning to ask whether he supplements his salary with stud fees. "It's somewhat weird," he says. "What they are trying to do is create an intellectual superman, and selecting winning Nobel Prize scientists is not the way to do it." Charles H. Townes (Physics, 1964) of the University of California at Berkeley dismissed the project as "snobbish," and the Salk Institute's Dr. Renato Dulbecco (Medicine, 1975) disqualified himself. Said he: "I was vasectomized long ago."

What of the moral considerations? Among other things, says Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings, N.Y., Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences, the plan assumes that brighter is better, and that the Nobel Prize is a rough index to social usefulness. Says he: "There's no guarantee that high IQ people produce better people or a better society. It is not the retarded kids of the world who produce the wars and destruction." Graham's project may not even make good sense on its own terms. Nobel sperm may be bright, but the donors are usually far along in years. Shockley, for example, is 70, and recent studies suggest that the chance of having a mongoloid child increases not only with the mother's age, but with the father's too, especially if he is 55 or older.

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