What Ever Happened to the Mysterious Nobel Prize Sperm Bank?
By Anna Silman,
The Cut
| 08. 01. 2019
Yesterday, the New York Times published a story about alleged sex trafficker and cartoon villain Jeffrey Epstein’s plan to “seed the human race with his DNA” by impregnating 20 women at once at his New Mexico ranch. According to one scientist, he got his idea from the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank that was designed to collect the sperm of Nobel Prize winners in order to fill the world with their genius offspring.
Wait — what?
While it sounds like something out of the movie Gattaca, the “Nobel Prize Sperm Bank” really was operational for 20 years, from 1979 to 1999, and based in Escondido, California. It was founded by the multimillionaire optometrist and inventor Robert Graham, an admirer of eugenics who believed the human race was getting progressively dumber and that the only way to stop it was by filling the world with the genetic descendants of Nobel Prize winners. As part of his utopian vision (or dystopian vision, depending on how you look at it), he also planned to recruit only married heterosexual...
Related Articles
The Center for Genetics and Society is delighted to recommend the current edition of GMWatch Review – Number 589. UK-based GMWatch, a long-standing ally, was founded in 1998 by Jonathan Matthews as an independent organization seeking to counter the enormous corporate political power and propaganda of the GMO industry and its supporters. Matthews and Claire Robinson are its directors and managing editors.
CGS works to ensure that social justice, equity, human rights, and democratic governance are front...
By Ryan Cross, Endpoints News | 08.19.2025
Human eggs are incredibly rare cells. The ovary typically produces only 400 mature eggs across a woman’s life. But biologists in George Church’s lab at Harvard University — a group that’s never content with nature’s limits — just got a...
By Katherine Drabiak, Journal of Medical Ethics Forum | 08.07.2025
Adapted from Mitochondrial DNA at
National Human Genome Research Institute
Recently, media outlets around the world have been reporting on children born from pronuclear genome transfer (sometimes called “3-parent IVF,” “mitochondrial donation” or “mitochondrial replacement therapy”) at Newcastle Fertility Center...
By Nicky Hudson, The Conversation | 08.12.2025
