Author: Date: Saturday, March 8, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: NEWS

Only bright young women need apply, especially those with an interest in spawning a new generation of the brightest, if not necessarily the best.

There is an ultraselect new sperm bank in Southern California, the brainchild, as it were, of a California businessman named Robert K. Graham. And its donors are winners of the Nobel Prize in Science.

Here on the East Coast, the reaction yesterday to this attempt to produce geniuses ranged from gasps to guffaws.

"That's hilarious; you've made my day," laughed Harvard University's Prof. Sheldon Glashow, a Nobel laureate in physics. "And what does he propose to do for women Nobel laureates?"

Despite the hilarity at this end of the country, the new sperm bank is apparently serious business for Graham. According to reports published yesterday, Graham's sperm bank has already supplied sperm for three women, and he has tapped at least four Nobel prizewinning scientists for sperm donations.

The only scientist who admits having donated to Graham's sperm bank is Stanford University's controversial William B. Shockley, 70, who said in a Los Angeles Times interview he's disappointed that more of his fellow Nobel winners haven't agreed to donate.

"Yes, I'm one of them," Shockley said. "This is a remarkable attempt, and I'm thoroughly in sympathy with this sort of an approach."

Shockley added that "I welcome this opportunity to be identified with this important cause. But I want to make it clear also that I don't regard myself as a perfect human being or the ideal candidate. I'm not proposing to make supermen."

A winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics, Shockley has since become extremely controversial because of his outspoken views on the question of race and intelligence. In some instances he has been prevented from speaking on
college campuses by hostile audiences.

Graham, 74, said he is merely carrying on the dream of 1946 Nobel prizewinning geneticist Hermann Muller. Muller had advocated establishing sperm banks in which donations from brilliant men would be stored until after their deaths. Later, carefully selected women who wished to increase their chances of producing exceptionally bright children would receive the sperm.

Muller's ideas were bitterly attacked at the time, and he died at age 76 a disappointed man.

Much of the opposition to this idea, scientists explained, comes from the fact that it probably won't work, because not enough is known yet about how geniuses are produced. Indeed, a fundamental, often bitter argument is under way among scientists now over whether heredity has much to do with intelligence.

"There's no reason to think that individuals born as a result of use of this sperm bank will have any greater chance of being geniuses than anyone else in the world. I think it's ridiculous," said Dr. Jonathan Beckwith, professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at the Harvard School of Medicine.

He warned, too, that there seems to be "the potential for some real psychological damage to any individual born from this, who will live under the burden of having to grow up trying to be a genius."

Graham, who lives in Escondido, Calif., near San Diego, said the women who get the sperm need pay only shipping costs, plus a refundable deposit on the container used to keep the sperm frozen.

An MIT scientist who asked not to be identified, commented, however, that "it could be a clever confidence game. If people believe they're getting real genius seeds, perhaps the price could go up beyond $10,000."

Biologist George Wald of Harvard, who won the Nobel prize in 1967, laughed heartily when told of the sperm bank idea, then commented:

"Oh, this is a crushing blow, to be left out of this sperm bank. I felt badly enough when I only made it into President Nixon's second enemies list."

Wald added, too, that "I hope he (Graham) has checked out the sperm's motility if he's starting at that (Shockley's) age level," because the sperm
from older men are often unable to "swim" as vigorously as the sperm from young men.

A Harvard scientist who's now deeply embroiled in the long argument over heredity and intelligence, Prof. Edward O. Wilson, declared that "even if such a practice could be morally justified, it's a dubious exercise because of our lack of knowledge of the determinants of genius. True genius appears very sporadically, and is to a large degree unpredictable."

Wilson, Harvard's Baird Professor of Science, explained that he wrote about the subject of genetics and genius in his recent book "On Human Nature," which reads:

"If variation (in intelligence) is influenced to a moderate degree by heredity, as the evidence suggests, we should expect individuals of truly extraordinary capacity to emerge unexpectedly in otherwise undistinguished
families, and then fail to transmit these qualities to their children.

"Since each individual produced by the sexual process contains a unique set of genes, very exceptional combinations of genes are unlikely to appear twice, even within the same family. So, if genius is to any extent hereditary, it winks on and off through the gene pool in a way that would be difficult to measure or predict."

That means, basically, that the flowering of genius is apparently quite random, and that selection of bright parents doesn't ensure production of superior children.

Graham, who set up his new sperm bank in an underground concrete vault, said that so far about two dozen women have expressed interest in obtaining sperm samples. One woman, Graham said, wrote:

"I'm very excited about this. I certainly hope the insemination will take. I'm tentatively going to select number 13 because he is the youngest of the donors and has the highest IQ."

Graham said he started his numbering system of 10 instead of 1.

Women who apply, he explained, are offered a selection of sperm. An applicant "sees those forms the Nobelists fill out, but with the names removed. We started out including photographs at age 21, but in too many cases there was too much resemblance."

The forms, he said, list the sperm donor's weight, height, age, IQ, various hereditary or outstanding characteristics, color of eyes, skin, hair, the number of offspring and the number of normal children."

That last question is important, Graham said, because "it would show that he's a good male and that his kids are normal. And that's important to a woman who's choosing, so she knows he's not an untested stud."

Graham said he also puts in his own comments at the bottom of the form, such as: "A very famous scientist, A mover and shaker. Almost a superman."

Not every woman, Graham said, will be allowed to participate, "I don't want a whole flock of ordinary women."

Those who apply for sperm samples must begin by filling out questionnaires. Graham said that "We ask for their general health and if they have any family hereditary defects. It's a questionnaire prepared by several people - to make sure we covered the important questions. Then we pick the cream of the crop."

He noted, too, that there are no barriers concerning a Nobel laureate's race, religion or economic status.

Women who receive the sperm, in addition, must agree to keep Graham informed about their pregnancies, and also "when any children are born of this, how well is the child, what his tested IQ is as time goes on, and so forth," he said.

In a survey done by the Los Angeles Times, 11 Nobelists reported they had been contacted by Graham, while a dozen others said if they had been contacted, they didn't remember.

None of the six Nobel laureates contacted by The Globe in the New England area yesterday had been solicited to participate.

Among those who turned down Graham's offer to participate were three Nobelists at the California Institute of Technology.

"I think it's pretty silly," said biophysicist Max Delbruck.

An aide to physicists Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann said, "Neither of them wanted any part of it because they don't believe in the concept."

Graham said he doesn't expect to live long enough to see this idea reach fruition, but he's content that "it's going forward."

Wald, at Harvard, commented, however, that "he (Graham) is making a fundamental mistake, because if one polled American women they might greatly prefer Ronald Reagan's sperm to that of any living physicist."

Another scientist commented ruefully: "This is the logical arena where all the lunatic fringes can come together."

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