‘The Genius Factory’: Test-Tube Superbabies

Polly Morrice reviews The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank by David Plotz, in the New York Times Book Review:

”All parents expect too much of their children,” David Plotz writes in ”The Genius Factory,” his beguiling account of one man’s struggle to ensure that everyone’s children — at least white ones — would come up to the mark. In our era of rampant parental ambition, of ”aggro soccer dads and home schooling enthusiasts plotting their children’s future one spelling bee at a time,” the cockeyed vision of Robert K. Graham, a California millionaire who sought to create cadres of baby geniuses, seems less bizarre than it probably did in 1980, when Graham’s Repository for Germinal Choice, better known as the Nobel Prize sperm bank, opened its doors.

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