Free The Genius Factory by David Plotz

to add Michael’s second-generation Nobel genes to his bank. The Repository catalog hinted coyly at his Nobel heritage, describing an accomplished musician with an “outstanding history of achievement . . . in his family.” (Michael acknowledged what I had suspected: his father had been one of Graham’s three original Nobel donors, though he hadn’t stuck with it. Because the dad had quit, Graham might have been more eager to bank the son’s seed.)
    Michael and his wife had no children of their own, but Michael’s eagerness to reproduce had not faded with age. The only reason he had stopped donating was that he was now so old that sperm banks wouldn’t accept him anymore. He tried to work around the age restriction. He recently learned that one sperm bank he had donated to was merely
storing
his sperm for the future, not distributing it to clients, so he pestered the bank to return the stored samples to him. He wanted to give away the samples himself. He placed ads in a local newspaper volunteering his sperm to lesbian couples and single women. He was hoping to find a woman who would let him stay in touch with the child. Not that he intended to financially support the kid or be a father—he just wanted to check in when it was convenient. When I wondered how many kids he had fathered, Michael stopped to pause and calculate. He guessed fifty, including fifteen through the Nobel sperm bank.
    I asked him why he had spent the best years of his life donating sperm. Michael lit up. “When I heard about being a sperm donor, I thought, this is
great
! I am helping women. I am helping the human race because I have good genes. And I am passing on my genes.”
    He leaned in, his voice urgent, his skeletal fingers pointing at me. “I have studied evolutionary biology, and
this
is what evolution is all about. Winning is passing on your genes, and losing is failing to do so. There are lots of games that men have made up, games where you win by scoring runs.” He paused, as if to emphasize the pointlessness of such games. “But the
main
game of the universe, the
only
game that matters, is the game of evolution, and you win by passing on genes. And I wanted to
win
!” He spoke this last sentence with a smug grin. It was just about the creepiest thing I have ever heard anyone say.
    Sitting in his depressing condo, I looked at Michael and thought, You
are genetic victory
?
    Michael, I realized glumly, was the living test of Robert Graham’s theory. He was the son of one of Graham’s original Nobel donors: in other words, exactly the kind of person Graham aspired to create. Michael was the finished product of Graham’s logic—blessed with allegedly magnificent Nobel genes. Yet all I saw in him was the fickleness of DNA: Here was a Nobel Prize baby, and he was no prize at all.
    While I was talking to donors, I began to hear from parents with children by the Repository as well. The first to e-mail me were mothers who had read about Edward. I wrote about these mothers in
Slate,
and other parents saw those stories and contacted me, which led to more articles. Each story attracted another few parents and kids, until eventually I was in touch with two dozen families. The Internet did exactly what my editors and I had hoped: it allowed readers to collaborate with me to discover the lost history of the Repository.
    The first Repository parent I actually met was “Lorraine O’Brien.” A couple weeks after my first article, I traveled to see her. I had found Lorraine, rather than her finding me. I had seen her name in an old newspaper article about the Repository. Lorraine was taken aback that I had located her—the newspaper reporter had been supposed to keep Lorraine anonymous, and Lorraine had never seen the finished article with her real name in it—but she agreed to see me anyway.
    Lorraine was a neurologist, and I dropped by her exceptionally busy practice one afternoon in February. Lorraine was a brunette in her early forties.