Intelligent design: The radical genius sperm bank experiment that only accepted Nobel Prize winners semen
If I were to tell you there once existed a “genius sperm bank” which exclusively accepted the semen of Nobel Prize winners, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a dystopian sci-fi plot.Yet exist it did.It was one of the most radical experiments in human breeding and genetic engineering the world has ever known.It had a big yet inadvertent impact on shaping the fertility industry as we know it today – including in Australia.What’s more, the so-called genius offspring – 217 of them – are coming of age today and could help settle an age-old question: are such traits down to nature or nurture?One author of a newly released book, having studied such super kids, has a somewhat blunt answer.Created in the 1970s, the infamous sperm bank was accepting donations for its controversial elitist experiment in the USA right up until 1999.That means the youngest of its new breed of so-called geniuses will be turning 25 around now.Conceived by American millionaire Robert K.Graham, who made his fortune by inventing scratchproof lenses for spectacles, the idea was to collect sperm from Nobel laureates in science and distribute it to “intelligent women.”The ultimate goal? To breed an entire generation of geniuses.
Its official name was “Graham’s Repository for Germinal Choice.”Graham wanted to do this because he believed the American population was getting lazy and degenerate.He was alive at a time when American paranoia about communism being the very opposite of the American rugged individual dream was soaring.In a welfare state, “retrograde humans,” as Graham called them, could flourish.
He couldn’t have that – and his social engineering endeavour would counter it.Ultimately, Graham recruited just three Nobel laureates to his cause.In announcing the plan, he understandably became a pariah and was roundly ridiculed and condemned in the American media – from newspaper columns to “Saturday Night Live.”What he was proposing was uncomfortably simi...