Author(s): David Plotz

Popular Science

The Genius Factory is the story of the Nobel Prize sperm bank, one of the most radical experiments in human breeding ever. In 1980 millionaire inventor Robert Graham began recruiting Nobel prize-winners and other accomplished men as donors to his genius sperm bank, in the hope of breeding a cadre of brilliant scientists, politicians and leaders. The Nobel sperm bank fathered more than 200 children before it closed in 1999. The Genius Factory tells the story of the bank, but it also tells the very remarkable stories of the bank's children and donors. It follows Tom, a fifteen-year-old boy, as he searches the country for his real biological dad, whom he knows only by his Nobel sperm bank codename: "Donor Coral". And it describes the extraordinary meetings between children and their lost fathers - the first time in US history that anonymous sperm donors and their kids have met. Funny, riveting, and above all wonderfully humane, The Genius Factory is at once a timeless and completely contemporary book about who we are and how we are made.