Who's your daddy? Genes, aspiration, and the Nobel Prize sperm bank.

• Author: Brownlee, Shannon
• Position: Book by David Plotz - Book Review

The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank By David Plotz Random House, $24.95

You don't have to dig very far into our nation's intellectual record to find strains of eugenics and genetic determinism. Between the 1920s and the 1960s, some 60,000 Americans, the so-called "unfit," many of them retarded or physically handicapped, but some of them simply afflicted with being poor, were hauled off by state and local officials and forcibly sterilized. The rationale for this sorry chapter in American history emerged from the confluence of three strands of Anglo-American thought. Fearing overpopulation, Thomas Malthus argued in the late 18th century that the poor needed to die young, because Mother Nature had ordained their suffering from disease, malnutrition, and congenital defects. The second strand drew on late 19th-century Social Darwinism, which provided the pseudo-scientific underpinnings for both Malthus and the third strand, early 20th-century American racial and ethnic paranoia. It was the British who provided the intellectual power behind Malthusian worries and Social Darwinism, but, as David Plotz points out in his curious new volume, The Genius Factory, it was the "can-do Americans who converted [it] into dismal practice."

It is against this backdrop that Robert Graham, an eccentric millionaire inventor from--where else?--Southern California, came up in the 1960s with the idea of a sperm bank devoted to spreading the seed of brilliant men. In 1980, when artificial insemination and anonymous sperm banks were becoming more popular; Graham founded the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was instantly dubbed the "Nobel Prize Sperm Bank" by the press. Grahams plan was to encourage a kind of positive eugenics; rather than weeding out the unfit, he hoped to create a generation of geniuses who would go forth, multiply, and counterbalance the rising tide of idiots. He dreamed of intelligent women--preferably those smart enough to qualify for the high-IQ club, Mensa--bearing a flock of uber-babies, endowed with the genes that would enable them to become scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs.

Plotz, an editor at Slate magazine, has written an engaging and surprisingly funny book about the history of the Nobel sperm bank, the men who donated to it, and the more than 200 children it, er, spawned. (I should confess in the interests of full disclosure that I have pitched stories to David.) His book is populated with a...