The Genius Sperm Bank
Robert Graham made his fortune inventing shatterproof eyeglass lenses, then spent it trying to engineer smarter babies. In 1980 he opened the Repository for Germinal Choice in Escondido, California, a sperm bank stocked with donations from Nobel Laureates and other high achievers, on the theory that concentrating their genes would benefit humanity. The film traces how few laureates actually agreed to donate, how the bank quietly widened its criteria to other scientists and successful men once recruitment stalled, and how the resulting children, now adults, have grappled with being born as an experiment in selective breeding. Interviews bring in the mothers who chose donors from typed profiles, the offspring tracking down biological fathers years later, and critics who call the whole project eugenics with a friendlier name. Graham died in 1997 and the repository closed not long after, but the film treats it less as a settled scandal than as an early, clumsy preview of the genetic selection now possible with modern reproductive technology.