Humanity has never suffered from a shortage of people willing to change the course of history. Sometimes such people founded new religions or empires, but more often they left the earthly vale with a reputation for madness. In our enlightened era, they are trying to bring scientific foundations under their "discoveries". This is exactly what an American millionaire did when he decided twenty-five years ago to ward off the threat of genetic degeneration from humanity
The first report of this unusual undertaking appeared in the Los Angeles Times, one of the most widely read and influential American newspapers. On February 29, 1980, her correspondent Edwin Chen posted a note about his visit to a private storage of human sperm. It was located on the estate of Robert Graham, a wealthy and eccentric resident of Escondido, half an hour's drive from San Diego. The 73-year-old owner of the estate told the journalist that he hopes to get semen samples from the smartest representatives of the strong half of humanity. He considered these scientists to be the Nobel Prize winners. Graham claimed that he had already secured the cooperation of three laureates and would soon attract many specialists of the same rank from various countries to the role of donors.
In his interview, Graham insisted that his idea was not at all the whim of an eccentric who is bathed in money and does not know where to attach his millions. He has a very businesslike and at the same time noble goal - to save future generations from a genetic catastrophe. America and the rest of the world, Graham said, suffer from a deterioration in the quality of hereditary material. Individuals with bad mental abilities, doomed to vegetation by nature, multiply uncontrollably. And if urgent measures are not taken, the human race will embark on the path of evolutionary regression.
To fight this evil, Graham needed a bank of hereditary material. He was going to store the sperm of men who have certified the strength of their character and the power of the intellect by brilliant success in science. He wanted to offer these priceless spermatozoa as a gift to expectant mothers. But not indiscriminately. According to his idea, the right to conceive from a super donor can only be given to a woman with a very high IQ. In other words, Graham bluntly told Chen that he was planning to conduct an artificial selection of outstanding personalities. Why on earth, he asked, should refuse to improve the human breed by the methods that have long and excellently proven themselves in animal husbandry and crop production?
Communication with the journalist was not limited to the lecture. Graham took the visitor to a concrete bunker where containers of semen samples frozen in liquid nitrogen were kept. He even opened one of the tanks and showed several dozen ampoules filled with what he said were laureate sperm.
Since Graham did not appear to be insane or outright cheating, Chen took the time to test his claims. He called all the Nobel Prize winners living in California (there were more than two dozen then) and asked if they had taken part in the Graham project. Half of those surveyed said they had never heard of him; the rest confirmed that Graham had asked them to donate, but they refused. Chen eventually approached Stanford University physics professor William Shockley, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1956 by the Swedish Academy of Sciences for his involvement in the invention of the transistor. After much deliberation, Shockley confessed to his donation. That was enough for Chen, and he sat down at the typewriter.
The newspaper article became an international sensation. Graham was instantly attacked on the phone by both journalists and women. On March 2, he held a press conference and shared his ambitious plans. He argued that in the near future, each large city will acquire its own storage of elite sperm. The production of geeks will be put on stream, and total stupidity will cease to threaten humanity. Graham insisted that he did not seek to create a race of supermen, his task was to increase the number of people with great intellectual abilities. As proof of the practicality of these plans, he again demonstrated the "Germinal Choice Repository" (which is what Graham called his underground vault). However, the journalists immediately renamed it "Nobel Sperm Bank".
Promotional video:
Who are you, Mr. Graham?
Robert Clark Graham was born in the summer of 1906 in the resort town of Harbor Springs on the shores of Lake Michigan in the family of a dentist. In his youth, he dreamed of the fame of Caruso and after graduation he devoted eight years to singing and music. Either the competition was fierce, or the talent was not enough, but Graham eventually chose the more reliable profession of an optometrist. During World War II, he worked on improving artillery scopes, and later got a job at the Univis Corporation, which provides spectacle lenses throughout the country. It was there that he came across the idea that made him a millionaire.
People have used glasses since time immemorial. It seems that the first idea of optical vision correction came to Roger Bacon in about 1267. At the beginning of the 14th century, glasses for farsighted people were already in full use in Europe, and after another hundred and fifty years, glasses for correcting myopia appeared. But until the 50s of the twentieth century, only glass served as the material for making lenses. The glasses, especially the strong ones, were heavy and, most importantly, fragile. For many years, dozens of inventors tried to develop a technology for the production of plastic lenses, but to no avail - they were easily scratched and badly polished. Graham decided that he was quite capable of this task, but the management of the company did not support him. Then Graham quit his job, moved to California and, using his own savings, began experiments with transparent polymer materials. After a series of setbacks, he came across a little-known plastic CR-39, from which fuel tanks for the "flying fortresses" were made during the war. The first casts from this material were no good, but by the end of 1947 Graham began to produce quite high-quality lenses. Within a few years, Armorlite, founded by Graham, quickly regained its place in the eyewear market. And when Graham invented clear lens coatings that absorb ultraviolet light and remove glare, his products gained widespread acclaim. And when Graham invented clear lens coatings that absorb ultraviolet light and remove glare, his products gained widespread acclaim. And when Graham invented clear lens coatings that absorb ultraviolet light and remove glare, his products gained widespread acclaim.
The inventor of plastic lenses was concerned with the need to urgently improve the intellectual potential of the human race long before the establishment of the Repository. In 1970 he published the book The Future of Man. The human brain, the self-taught Californian anthropologist argued, developed only as long as the human race was doomed to a fierce struggle for existence. Therefore, the intellectual progress of Homo sapiens took place only before the appearance of the Cro-Magnons (for some reason, Graham believed that this happened only 15 thousand years ago, in fact, twice as early). When humans learned to cultivate the land and raise animals, the pressure of natural selection decreased significantly. Weaklings, who would have died in childhood, now could not only survive, but also have offspring, passing on their wretched genes to him. Humanity has embarked on the path of mental regression and by now has dropped to a very low level. It is curious that Graham translated his theories into a purely political plane. He explained the emergence of the communist camp primarily by the fact that mediocrity prevailed in a significant part of the planet, which is impressed by the collectivist ideology.
The author of the book, despite all his twists and turns and factual errors, is still quite logical. Since natural selection is no longer working, why not resort to artificial selection? It is then that Graham brings down the idea of "germinal depositories", repositories and breeding grounds for sperm. Think, he urges, how will society benefit if it becomes possible to multiply the number of children of Louis Pasteur, Ernest Rutherford and Thomas Edison? Geniuses will be churned out one after another, like on an assembly line, and the intellectual potential of humanity will once again grow.
In the footsteps of the Spartans
Basically, the Californian messiah did not invent anything new. This is a banal retelling of eugenic ideas that were very fashionable in America in the first half of the twentieth century. It was then that many states passed laws authorizing the forced sterilization of "inferior" people, not only adults, but also children. After the defeat of Hitler's Germany, when the world learned about the Nazi policy of sterilizing the "yubermen", these acts began to be used much less often, but were finally canceled only in the sixties. About sixty thousand people were sacrificed for forced sterilization, this is one of the most shameful pages in recent US history.
Eugenicists have proposed a different strategy, more positive than negative. It consisted not in the elimination of "bad" genes by depriving their carrier of the ability to bear children, but in the multiplication of "good" genes, extra-class genes. Young women were encouraged to have children only from men with impeccable heredity. In Europe, these ideas blossomed in lush color at the end of the 19th century. They soon made their way to the other side of the Atlantic, where they provoked enthusiastic reactions from celebrities such as Theodore Roosevelt. This galaxy was joined by a very prominent geneticist and Nobel laureate Hermann Möller, who had a considerable influence on Graham (who even wanted to name his Repository in his honor, but changed his mind).
“What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun,” said Ecclesiastes. Eugenics in both its forms was practiced two and a half thousand years ago in ancient Sparta. The Spartan negative eugenics is well known - weak babies were thrown into the abyss. But there was also a positive one: the laws of the city-state allowed the head of the family to mobilize (there is no other word for it) young people promising to become high-quality producers into the matrimonial bedroom. Indeed, it is not in vain that they say that the new is the well-forgotten old.
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy once noticed that nature rests on the children of great people. Graham was obviously not familiar with this dictum, or he would hardly have proclaimed his messianic recipes with such aplomb. By his own admission, he did not believe in God, but in eugenics he found a surrogate for religion. In any case, Graham cannot be denied courage. Supersperm banks were thought about before him, in particular, Möller. However, Robert Graham was the first to bring this idea to life and did not spare a considerable share of his own capital for its implementation. He sold Armorlite for $ 70 million, invested in real estate and quickly raised his fortune to $ 100 million. Now he had both the time and the means to start making his great dream come true.
The rest was a matter of technique. Graham hired a lab technician who had previously worked at a fertility clinic. With his help, he not only set up a primitive laboratory at the back of his estate (several microscopes and Dewars with liquid nitrogen - that's all the equipment), but also learned how to check the viability of spermatozoa and preserve them in a special solution. Having finished all the preparations, Graham bombarded the Nobel Prize winners with letters, begging them to contribute with their genes to rid humanity from the advancing insanity. It is curious that he appealed exclusively to scientists - the genes of writers and public figures did not seem to him worthy of saving. If the candidate showed the slightest interest, Graham proceeded to telephone calls.
By the beginning of 1980, the sperm of three laureates and two other famous scientists who were not included in this glorious cohort were stored in his laboratory (it is possible that one of them was Jonas Salk, the creator of the live polio vaccine). Nevertheless, these genetic treasures were lying in vain, the potential mothers of future geniuses did not know anything about them. So Graham decided it was time to appeal to the masses. An interview with Chen followed - and the process began.
In search of donors
At first, Graham didn't seem to have much to complain about. The media turned him into a celebrity, albeit somewhat dubious. If anything, the women were ready to match. When the Repository was three years old, it received over a thousand sperm applications. Interestingly, Graham demanded that all candidates be legally married - this is how he cared about the moral foundations of society in his own way.
The donor situation turned out to be somewhat more complicated. After Graham became a public figure, not a single Nobel laureate had any business with him. Graham had hoped to improve the situation with the winners of the Fields Medal, the highest international award for mathematical research, but to no avail. The repository never published information about donors, the name of Shockley became known only because he identified himself, but there is no information that after 1980 at least one extra-class scientist entered into business contacts with Graham. By 1983, the Repository had a total of nineteen donor sperm - not a lot, let's face it. Probably, a significant role in this was played by the harsh criticism that genetics and anthropologists brought down on Graham, who declared his project an unscientific adventure. Finally,Graham expanded the selection framework and began looking for donors among rank-and-file university professors, graduate students, successful businessmen and even athletes.
Curiously, the name Shockley did not help him in any way. The credibility of one of the creators of the transistor has long ago reached the freezing point. Back in the mid-1950s, he abandoned research for the sake of electronic business, in which, to put it mildly, he did not succeed. After that, he, like Graham, became fixated on the idea of genetic regression of humanity, but his sermons also had a frank racist flavor (for example, he argued that blacks are "hereditary slaves" because of their low-quality DNA). In the end, Shockley began to openly glorify Hitler's eugenics, which caused general contempt. He retained a permanent position at Stanford, but other universities tried not to do business with him. So when information about the connection between Shockley and Graham came to the surface, many journalists suspected they were a neo-Nazi conspiracy. Probably,Graham's project would not be taken seriously anyway, but Shockley's involvement made it the object of overt and sometimes wicked ridicule. In 1991, the comic magazine Annals of Incredible Research awarded Graham the IgNobel Prize (in Russia it is usually called the Shnobelevka). She is noted for the most absurd of pseudoscientific ideas and developments.
In the late 1980s, the Repository found itself in an ambiguous position. The sperm of the Nobel class was no longer in it, and the one that was before turned out to be useless. Over time, it turned out that not a single woman who received the laureate spermatozoa got pregnant from them. Applications from potential mothers continued to be received, but it was very difficult to satisfy them. Graham was literally exhausted, even lassoed the gold-medal Olympian, but there were still not enough donors. It got to the point that, without any testing, the donors were credited with deceivers who attributed the highest IQ to themselves. Out of despair, Graham even somehow tried to enlist the participation of the husband of the British Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, who was not at all distinguished by exceptional intelligence, and was, to put it mildly, not very young. However,Graham never considered age a hindrance; among his donors there were also people in the sixth or seventh decade.
Finita la commedia
Nevertheless, the Repository retained its popularity among women in the 90s. The number of applications remained stable, and the average waiting period even increased from one year to one and a half years (mainly due to a shortage of donors, although this was not acknowledged). New manager Anita Neff, whom Graham recruited in 1993, demanded that donors undergo physical examinations and an IQ test. Graham decided that the demand for genius sperm would increase if it had to be paid for. He charged a considerable price, three and a half thousand dollars per serving, but there were still enough customers. However, the annual sales of the Repository never exceeded forty thousand, which was four to five times less than the cost of maintaining it. The founding father made up for the budget deficit from his own pocket, which, of course, was not a problem with his capital.
Yet Graham was uneasy. In 1996 he turned 90 years old. He felt pretty decent for such a respectable age, he even managed to recover from cancer, but, of course, he could not help but think about the approaching end. Graham wanted to keep the Repository running after his own death, so he set about finding a new patron. He has identified Floyd Kimble, an Ohio entrepreneur, as the successor to his business. He seemed to be the perfect successor: he was very rich, energetic, believed in eugenics and was just approaching his seventieth birthday. Kimble readily agreed to patronize the Repository and paid him $ 400,000 to begin with. It seemed that the Graham project was in good hands for a long time.
In the photo: Doron Blake, was the only one endowed with excellent data, his IQ was 180, at two years old he knew how to use a computer.
But fate intervened. In February 1997, Graham traveled to Seattle for the annual session of the American Association for Science, hoping to recruit a couple of donors there. While taking a bath in a hotel room, he passed out and drowned. His death did not go unnoticed; obituaries appeared in both the New York Times and Time magazine. After the announcement of the will, it turned out that the deceased had not left a cent to the Repository. Kimble did not give up on his promise and continued to fund the project. However, in September 1998, he died suddenly and the Repository was broke. The widow of Robert Graham and the son of Floyd Kimble agreed to close it, which was announced on April 29, 1999. The mainstream American press did not react to this in any way, only the newspaper "San Diego Union - Tribune" published an obituary column. The unused semen ampoules were sent to the incinerator.
What is the dry residue? Robert Graham had no imitators. The one and only sperm bank created by him helped to give birth to 215 newborns, the eldest of them have already grown up. There are no offspring of Nobel laureates among them. And the children turned out to be very different - some brighter, some simpler. One of them, Doron Blake, in his early years thundered all over America as an undoubted child prodigy, which was largely promoted by the ambition of his mother, but then, like many child prodigies, somehow wilted. In any case, so far no one has heard of the genius personalities who came off the assembly line of Graham's "factory".