Repository For Germinal Choice

Ten years after the birth of the first baby from his sperm bank, Robert Graham has a 1 1/2-year waiting list of potential mothers, a wall full of pictures of beautiful children and a shortage of good men. Although frustrated by the lack of tangible evidence that his theory holds up in real life, Graham remains captivated by the controversial notion that he can improve the human race by matching wanna-be mothers with the sperm of some of society's most scholarly men.

Robert Klark Graham, 90, a millionaire optometrist who founded the world's most discriminating sperm bank to nurture what he believed were the human seeds of genius, has died. He died Thursday in Seattle while attending the annual meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science. He was found in his hotel room bathtub after hitting his head in a fall, his wife, Marta Everton Graham, said.

Robert Klark Graham, 90, a millionaire optometrist who founded the world's most discriminating sperm bank to nurture what he believed were the human seeds of genius, has died. He died Thursday in Seattle while attending the annual meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science. He was found in his hotel room bathtub after hitting his head in a fall, his wife, Marta Everton Graham, said.

Ten years after the birth of the first baby from his sperm bank, Robert Graham has a 1 1/2-year waiting list of potential mothers, a wall full of pictures of beautiful children and a shortage of good men. Although frustrated by the lack of tangible evidence that his theory holds up in real life, Graham remains captivated by the controversial notion that he can improve the human race by matching wanna-be mothers with the sperm of some of society's most scholarly men.

ALMOST ANY woman who is married, sane, solvent and under 38 can qualify to be a recipient of sperm from the Repository for Germinal Choice. Applicants fill out a questionnaire signed by their doctor explaining why they want a child and detailing their genetic background, including a history of mental and physical health for both husband and wife. The recipients must be intelligent, emotionally stable and able to provide a decent standard of living for the child.

On the same day that the 1991 Nobel prize for literature was awarded to South African author Nadine Gordimer, researchers at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the creation of a new series of ersatz Nobel prizes for individuals who are likely to have been overlooked by the Nobel Committee. The new award is named after Ignatius Nobel, "inventor of soda pop" and a "distant cousin" of TNT discoverer Alfred Nobel, who created the namesake Nobel prizes.

Adrienne Ramm doesn't understand all the philosophical fuss over Escondido's controversial sperm bank. All three of Ramm's children came to her via liquid nitrogen tanks, containing the frozen sperm of two brilliant men that was shipped to her home in New York City from the Repository for Germinal Choice. Several women have had two babies by Robert Graham's sperm bank, but only Ramm has born three.

Ten years after the birth of the first baby from his sperm bank, Robert Graham has a 1 1/2-year waiting list of women, a wall full of pictures of beautiful and mostly blond children and a shortage of good men. Although frustrated by lack of tangible evidence that his theory holds up in real life, Graham remains captivated by the controversial notion that he can somehow improve the stock of the human race. By mixing and matching wanna-be mothers with the sperm of some of society's most scholarly men, Graham maintains this can become a better world.

Whose sperm is it, anyway? When it was first revealed last week, a California Supreme Court case that allowed a Los Angeles woman to take possession of 12 vials of semen frozen by her lover before he took his life almost six years ago may have seemed startling. But far from a curiosity, reserving sperm for use after a man's death turns out to be an increasingly common practice--made more so by rapidly evolving technology.

One month after his 31st birthday, Carl David Anderson was teaching physics at Caltech when someone came knocking on the classroom door. It was a colleague bearing news: Anderson had won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of a subatomic particle known as the positron. "I thanked him and went back to teaching the class," recalled Anderson, now 85 and a Caltech professor emeritus. He did not mention the Nobel to his students. He remembers feeling "stunned."

NO ONE PICKETS outside the Nobel sperm bank in Escondido anymore. Its once-controversial deposits--the sperm of Nobel Prize winners and others possessing high IQs--now stir little more interest than the deposits of the Pacific Coast Savings bank next door. Seven years ago, they did. The opening of the world's first unabashedly exclusive sperm bank--designed to pull humanity up by its DNA strands by creating better and brighter babies--was an anti-egalitarian shock heard 'round the world.