There was a place in California known as the ‘Repository for Germinal Choice ‘. From the early 1980s to the late 1990s, they offered a place where women could be artificially inseminated by people of genius IQ levels. It was dubbed the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank by media reports, despite only a single Nobel Prizewinner was actually known to have contributed.
Even allowing that only 50% of the genes passed on were from a genius, the Repository did not produce geniuses at any kind of documented rate. It did produce people who felt a void from never knowing their father, as David Plotz found in his 2005 book, The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank .
Claretta Yvonne Dupree 2007. The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. Review of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank by David Plotz. New York: Random House, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-6124-5; 262 PAGES, HARDCOVER, $24.95 (USA), $34.95 (CANADA). Ethics & Medicine 23, no. 1 (April 1): 63-64. Available from Proquest.com .
Of course, there were a number of structural problems with the operation of the sperm bank (self-selected donors, the donors of dubious giftedness…), but as other research has correlated, the fundamental problem was that genius is not something that happens to infants at the moment of conception. Genius – particularly in any societally meaningful way – is largely something that happens far further in the future than that… and continuously along the genius’ life. This will be a focus for a number of my upcoming posts on this blog.
If this is the case – and research suggests that it is – then the influence of parents on their children cannot be understated, and what the parents consistantly convey to their children can make all the difference…
Andrew Smith.
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