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The institution that most nearly fulfills the dubious idea of selective breeding is the Repository for Germinal Choice, of Escondido, Calif., which announced at its opening in 1980 that it would use sperm donated by Nobel prizewinners. The repository has received the cooperation of only three such prizewinners and now relies on donors of less than Nobel stature, but Founder Robert Graham is as enthusiastic as ever. "We're proud of our results," says he of the repository's 15 children. "These kids will sail through schools. We are indicating how good human beings can have it."
Given a choice, most parents would probably prefer a bright child, but intelligence is hardly the only variable. Many sperm banks now offer prospective parents some options on what the collaborating donors look like, on the ground that it is preferable for the child to resemble its legal parents. From there it is only a short step before some parents try to choose blonds instead of brunets, or boys instead of girls. A German clinic in Essen claims that its sperm donors include "no fat men, no long ears, no hook noses . . ." "We can talk in impressive pseudoscientific terms about how we want to help society," says the Rev. Roger Shinn, professor of social ethics at New York's Union Theological Seminary, "but as long as genetic manipulation is the motive, what we would be doing is what Hitler intended to do."
There are also tricky questions posed by the financing of the new technology. Dr. John Buster of the UCLA School of Medicine has been working since 1979 to develop a technique of embryo transplants for women who are unable to conceive but able to carry a child to term. The husband's sperm is used to impregnate a woman artificially; the embryo is then flushed out and implanted in the man's wife. The first two babies to be produced by this method were born this year.
"We called the National Institutes of Health in 1980, and we were told that no money was available for this work," says Buster. "The people who make these decisions are politicians, and they have to make those decisions to remain in office. After all, infertility never killed anyone." So Buster made an alliance with Randolph Seed, a surgeon, and his brother Richard, a scientist who had experimented in cattle breeding. The Seed brothers' Chicago firm, Fertility and Genetics Research Inc., invested $500,000 in Buster's UCLA project, and they have applied for a patent on the process. Despite criticism of this arrangement by a number of doctors, Richard Seed declares, "This is a typical free-market activity. We have investors expecting to obtain a return on their money."