So goes a line in David Plotz’s new tome The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank
, and, curiously, that is what the reader (at least this one) comes away feeling after completing the book: a lot of effort exerted, but with a highly disappointing result.
I picked up the book as I had a day to give over to light reading, and a history of the so-called Nobel Prize Sperm Bank (actually Robert Klark Graham’s Repository for Germinal Choice) seemed like a good way to fill it; after all, I was curious to see what this curious cadre of noble sperm spawned. But instead of a group of interesting biographies, the reader gets a characterization of Graham (and his most infamous donor, William Shockley) as a eugenic, racist loons, whose ideas were the epitome of the word preposterous; a half-assed history of eugenics and the Repository, full of the obligatory -ist adjectives every other paragraph; a myriad of Plotz’s opinions about everything from artificial insemination to how parents expect too much from their children–many of which contradict each other; and, in between all this, a few plodding biographical sketches of the offspring and donors.
What struck me the most were two things. First, is Plotz’s inconsistencies: He insists that Graham’s ideas were coo-coo, yet later he concedes that they were good enough to forever shaped the sperm donation/artificial insemination industry. After all, when shopping for sperm today, who would purposefully go after semen from a man with a sub-average intelligence, sub-par health, and noticeable lack of morality. Perhaps serendipitous, but that is what Graham set out to do in the first place: set up a way to allow for positive eugenics; that is, trying to improve mankind’s intelligence, health, and morality via selective breeding. Moreover, Plotz implicitly condemns the thought of producing better babies (on purpose), yet later says that it is now common practice (although more at an individual level). Throughout the book, he leads the reader to believe that a kid’s environment is what causes him/her to be intelligent, personable, and successful, but at other points he admits that they are all influenced genetically. All in all, he takes no position (well, not for long anyway), and his ambivalence is tiresome.
In between his own diatribes, he gives a few glimpses of what the Repository kids are like: one is a reclusive “genius” in college, another a precocious, buoyant girl who is likely to enter in Marine Biology (following, ahem, her biological father’s footsteps, who was a chemist). One is a teenage father, although fervently struggling to go to school and take care of his family, while another (his 1/2 brother by the same Repository dad) is a “gifted” pianist/artist…..although remarkably similar having never seen, or heard of, each other and only having 1 parent in common. While only a handful of the 215, all in all, not too motley a crew, despite Plotz not-always-flattering picture of them.
But what really strikes me about the book is, despite Plotz implications to the contrary, the kids turned out to show the potency of genetics. Quantitative genetics would predict that if you take a group of sperm donors who are “above average”1 in intelligence, health, and morals, you would get, in return, a group of kids who, as a group, are above average. If a father’s trait, say, IQ, is 140 (not a far-fetched figure for the Repository) and assume that the heritability for IQ is .40 (an underestimate), then if the mom’s IQ is 85, then the average value for the kids will be 105; if the mom’s IQ is 120 (a more sensible estimate for the moms seeking Repository sperm), the average value for the kids is 112, and you can interpolate as high or low as you want.2 On average, the kids won’t attain the parents’ values, but they will be above average. While Plotz does his best to paint a dismal picture of the whole Repository, and tries to convince the reader that it is the kids’ environment that one should worry about the most, he can’t help but adding evidence to the genetic theory: “In short, they are certainly above average as a group, but the range is wide”…exactly what quantitative genetics would have predicted about genetically-influenced traits.
In sum, the book is little more than a collection of essays showing Plotz’s ambivalence and ostensible lack of knowledge in quantitative (behavior) genetics, with a few anecdotes about the Repository thrown in for good measure; in other words, read the local library’s copy.
[1] According to Plotz, even though Nobel laureates donated, none of their sperm fertilized an egg carried to term. The sperm that did was from other donors, who were sans Nobel.
[2] Y_hat = X_bar + (h^2){([Mom’s Score + Dad’s score]/2)-X_bar}, where X_bar is the population average.
Posted by A. Beaujean at 08:12 PM