July 3, 2005/New York TIMES. 'The Genius Factory': Test-Tube Superbabies By POLLY MORRICE
''All parents expect too much of their children,'' David Plotz writes in ''The Genius Factory,'' his beguiling account of one man's struggle to ensure that everyone's children -- at least white ones -- would come up to the mark. In our era of rampant parental ambition, of ''aggro soccer dads and home schooling enthusiasts plotting their children's future one spelling bee at a time,'' the cockeyed vision of Robert K. Graham, a California millionaire who sought to create cadres of baby geniuses, seems less bizarre than it probably did in 1980, when Graham's Repository for Germinal Choice, better known as the Nobel Prize sperm bank, opened its doors.
Plotz, only 10 at the time, recalls his father's appalled reaction to the notion of using brainiac sperm to spawn wunderkinder: He tried to explain it was ''the sort of thing Hitler would have tried.'' Has Graham's project lost its sinister edge? This is one of two inquiries that Plotz, the deputy editor at Slate, explores in his first book.
The reader may conclude Hitler would have been more efficient than Graham. Although Graham's business talents allowed him to parlay his invention of plastic eyeglass lenses into a great fortune, he fumbled the first stage of his grand scheme -- cajoling Nobel winners in science to provide their superior seed to improve America's gene pool. The problem was his showpiece donor: William Shockley, a pioneer of the transistor who shared the 1956 Nobel in physics. Shockley's sperm, ''a superb asset,'' in Graham's view, was the first contribution frozen, color-coded and offered to infertile couples eager to conceive. In this case Graham's natural marketing flair was done in by his knee-jerk adoration of brilliance. For years Shockley had preached that whites were genetically superior to blacks, and he was widely despised. Reporters who might have seen the genius sperm bank as ''well meaning and perhaps even visionary'' perceived it as inseparable from Shockley's racism. It was reviled as a horror and lampooned as a joke, and Nobel donors shunned it.
So the Nobel Prize sperm bank produced no Nobel offspring (even Shockley quit donating sperm, fearing his was too aged to beget healthy children). Yet Graham kept the bank in business nearly two decades, with slightly lowered standards for donors. His staff wooed successful scientists and businessmen who were athletic, healthy and tall (Graham discovered American parents were wary of little eggheads). He lured customers by letting them select donors from an irresistible collection of what Plotz calls ''prime cuts of American man.'' By the time the bank closed in 1999, its customers had produced 215 babies, a respectable addition to the national ''germ plasm,'' as Graham might have said.
Those children populate the second part of Plotz's story. In a 2001 article in Slate, Plotz sought information from anyone connected with the repository. He soon found himself cast as the ''Semen Detective,'' trying to hook up sperm-bank children and their mothers with the anonymous progenitors. This would be difficult territory for any writer, and Plotz has to reassure himself that none of his confidants wants him to ''go all Oprah.'' No wonder. We meet, for instance, a young man who desperately hopes his biological dad will be a better father than the one who raised him. Plotz's kindness shines through, but some readers may wonder if the book's halves -- explorations of the nature of parenthood and the morality of the Nobel sperm bank -- are coherent.
But in the end, the themes mesh. Plotz's meetings with employees, consumers and offspring of the repository, sympathetic people on the whole, may have led him to his understated conclusion that the enterprise wasn't so terrible. For one thing, Graham's inspired strategy of providing consumers a choice of the most desirable men possible freed women from the tyranny of early fertility doctors. And it has become standard industry practice; as Plotz says, ''All sperm banks have become eugenic sperm banks.''
Indeed, reproductive technologies all have eugenic possibilities now, especially preimplantation genetic diagnosis, a means of screening embryos that may one day let parents select the traits they wish for their children. Plotz labels this petri dish micromanagement an instance of ''private eugenics.'' But, he argues, even parents who ''will be lining up for P.G.D. and hoping for a prodigy'' have no use for traditional eugenics, which, in its brutal, negative form, culminated in the Nazis' ''mercy killings'' of those they judged unfit. ''Negative eugenics,'' Plotz says, ''was state-sponsored and brutal. But 'positive' eugenics took a milder approach.'' Graham's version ''sought to increase the number of outstanding people,'' in Plotz's phrase. Is personal eugenics -- producing a superkid for yourself instead of for the master race -- problematic? Plotz suggests the influence of genes is dicey enough and the role of nurture strong enough that we are delusional if we think we can make our children ''what we want them to be, rather than what they are.''
This conclusion, however comforting for parents of teenagers, won't quash everyone's objections. It doesn't address the recent swing toward nature in the old nature vs. nurture debate. Nor does it provide an answer for those who fear that prenatal screening may lead scientists to limit future research on genetic disorders. But Plotz's take on the role of genes now -- in our imaginations and in fact, so far as we can determine that -- is humane and funny, which are fine traits for any argument, or any book.
Polly Morrice is writing a book about autism.
-- Jim Devine "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.