Genius Factory
David Plotz

THE GENIUS FACTORY is the story of the Nobel Prize sperm bank, one of the most radical experiments in human breeding ever. In 1980 a millionaire inventor called 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. THE GENIUS FACTORY is also the first book to peer inside the secret world of sperm banking, an industry that has produced more than half a million kids with virtually no accountability, and previews our coming age of genetic expectations. their children's genes, making them smarter, healthier, and more beautiful than nature intended. The 200 children of the Genius Factory are messengers from that future: what happens to kids who are genetically designed to be brilliant? 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.