A BIZARRE EXPERIMENT ENDS

This strange tale began in 1980 when multi-millionaire, Robert Graham, who made his fortune as the inventor of shatter-proof lenses, decided to invest his money in a bizarre project. He earnestly hoped that his project would improve and help mankind.

Mr. Graham established a sperm bank in California which he called the Repository for Germinal Choice, where the brightest 1% of scientists, businessmen and professionals were to contribute their genetic inheritance to the human race by offering women the chance to give birth to potential geniuses. Clearly, Mr. Graham was discounting the critical role that families play in children's development, believing, instead, that intelligence along was the answer. Critics claimed he was trying to create a master race, however, Mr. Graham's defence was that if even one of the offspring found a cure for cancer, it would be worthwhile.

Among Mr. Graham's first recruits as donors were at least three Nobel laureates, including the controversial physicist, William Shockly, who made his scientific contribution as the inventor of transistors, but who also promoted the theory that whites were genetically superior to blacks. By his promotion of this idea, Dr. Schockly exposed a basic flaw in the sperm bank scheme —an individual's intelligence doesn't guarantee that he/she necessarily has any common sense, judgment, humanity or plain decency.

Approximately 230 children were born of this repository. In the early 1990s, Mr. Graham attempted a systematic evaluation of his experiment, distributing questionnaires to the parents of the repository's offspring. Most, however, declined to answer.

Mr. Graham died in 1997 at the age of 90 and his repository was closed and the frozen sperm discarded. No one knows what happened to the repository's records.

This ends a bizarre experiment that was based on the misconception that high intelligence is the key to improving mankind. Our experience in this recently-ended century with Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot — all men of apparently high intelligence — should be sufficient warning of the uselessness of Mr. Graham's scheme

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