What Ever Happened to the Mysterious Nobel Prize Sperm Bank?

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...