The Genius Factory: Unravelling the Mystery of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank

by David Plotz (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $5.99

  In 1980 an eccentric American millionaire launched a 'Nobel Prize sperm bank', intended to create a new generation of superkids. Stocked with the seed of gifted scientists, inventors, businessmen and thinkers, including several Nobel laureates, the 'genius factory' produced more than 200 children before it quietly closed its doors in 1999. What happened to them? Were they the brilliant progeny its founder expected? In this stunning, eye-opening and hugely entertaining book, David Plotz tracks down many of the donors, children and mothers involved, and sheds new light on the fascinating battle between nature and nurture.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $3.41

  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.