PRETENSIONS TO IMMORTALITY
Author:
Date: Wednesday, March 5, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: EPG
From southern California, where practically anything grows and peculiar
ideas blossom, comes The Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank limited
to Nobel science laureates.
The goal is to artificially impregnate highly intelligent volunteers to
produce superchildren, little pedigreed vehicles to carry the donors' superior
genes into future generations. (By the year 2003, an advertisement might offer
Select Breeder by Nobel Laureate out of Nuclear Physicist, age 22, IQ 178,
mating fee $750,000).
Nobel Laureate Herman Muller first proposed the idea in 1946. At the time,
what was left of Western civilization was still very touchy about eugenic
schemes in the aftermath of Hitler's master race madness and nothing came of
it. Now the scheme is a reality, although so far neither great numbers of
donors nor recipients have stormed the concrete bunker where an Escondido
businessman stores the frozen samples.
The sperm of some Nobel laureates may be no bargain anyway, since the
superior intelligence is often tainted by eccentricity or physical weakness.
World-class athletes or stevedores could turn out to be a better bet.
For centuries, royal families the world over have proven that selective
breeding isn't everything. Granted, their motivations were more political than
scientific; but it is worth noting that they seldom seemed to breed for
brains.
If producing humans with high IQs is the goal, improved educational
stimuli, nutrition and health care for the very young of the world might be
more effective. If producing better humans is the goal, we may just have to go
back to the drawing board - Are you listening, God? - or to the geneticist's
laboratory.
Healthy young men have been in demand as sperm bank donors for a number of
years. Some visionaries dream of establishing sperm banks as a hedge against
the possibility of genetic deterioration among members of space crews on
missions, which might last so long that reproduction would become an issue.
And the doomstruck envision sperm banks to restock the world in case of a
global cataclysm. Who gets chosen to stock such banks may become one of the
great arguments of the future.
Nobody can guarantee that children produced from the sperm of Nobel prize
winners will be brilliant. And nobody can know whether any of them might lug
those Nobel genes to infamy. Chances are pretty good that, if identified, they
will simply be hapless oddities, hounded through life by the morbidly curious.
One thing is sure about the Hermann Muller Repository for Germinal Choice:
It will do more to enhance the fantasies of a few aging men with pretensions
to immortality than it will to improve the species.
LOCKMA;03/03,14:06 ANNMAC;03/06,09 B08035882
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