THC: Did the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank produce any geniuses?

I don’t know all the kids. I only talked to 30 of them and it is not a random study; these are just the families who got in touch with me. As a group they’re certainly above average.

There are some who are below average students; there are some with health problems. And there are some who are quite extraordinary: there is the smartest teenager I think I’ve ever met, a wonderful opera singer, and great athletes among them.

I don’t think it has anything to do with the sperm they got. First, the donors didn’t turn out to be the great men of the age. The incredibly smart kid came from Donor Corals’ [one of the less accomplished donors] sperm. In many ways, it is a tribute to nurture. Considering that these are the women who would seek out a place called the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank, it’s no surprise they have turned out accomplished. These are exceptionally attentive mothers in prosperous homes pushing their children to fully cultivate their talents.

THC: What do you think these mothers were looking for when they used the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank?

DAP: They were not looking for Nobel Prize winners. Although Graham wasn’t able to recruit very many Nobel Prize Winners, there wasn’t actually that much demand for super brainiacs. The women wanted to know the heights of the donors, if they had musical abilities, and their family health history. Brains were only one of the characteristics they valued. Although he was forced to recruit other donors because of a lack of supply, Graham was a businessman and quickly realized that having other kinds of donors was a good marketing move. The biggest attraction of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank was the sense of choice.

You have to remember that this was the early ’80s. If you needed sperm, most doctors aren’t going to give you any choice and most sperm banks are not going to give you any choice. Often, doctors would just use the nearest able bodied medical student and you were lucky if characteristics like eye color and hair color matched.

Graham introduced the idea that you could shop for sperm, which you really couldn’t do before. His innovation played a big role in creating the consumer economy of fertility. He forced the other sperm banks to take the things the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank had done well and do them even better and without the weird philosophy behind it.

THC: Did anyone else contact you as a result of the publicity from the book? What were some of the reactions of the people you wrote about? Have you talked to them about the content?

DAP: I have heard from several new donors and children, including some whom I have since introduced to each other. The subjects of the book have all responded, except for a couple, including Michael the Nobelist’s Son. They all like it, and think it tells their stories truly. Even folks who I thought might not be so happy about it like it.

THC: What were your final feelings on Robert Graham as a man?

DAP: He’s an enthralling character. He made a profound improvement in American life by inventing shatterproof lenses—a genuinely huge advance. And he was motivated by essentially noble, and relatively harmless, goals. But he suffered from the problem of hyper-rationalists everywhere—the belief that the world would work perfectly if only smart people like me were allowed to control it and keep the morons in line.

He was deaf to human emotion and human frailty, which may be why he was not such a great father to his own kids.

THC: Why should Harvard students be interested in this book?

DAP: Most Harvard students come from families with expectations and this is very much a book about what it is like to grow up with expectations, particularly genetic expectations.