Published in GQ Active

IMMORTALITY: THE KID COULD BE THE KEY

by Paul Spencer Sochaczewski (c) 1999

The creation of Dolly the Cloned Sheep a few years ago stirred our imagination - we were suddenly closer to cloning people than anyone had imagined.

Since Dolly, cloning technology has advanced with such staggering speed that she seems almost anachronistic.

The latest news in the cloning sweepstakes is that three South Korean scientists say they've cloned a human cell from an infertile woman. Theoretically this embryo could have grown into a physical replica of the woman. The scientists said they destroyed the living cells because of the legal and ethical implications of their work.

I thought about this as I called up my son to wish him happy holidays.

He's my only child, and I'm proud of him.

This is hardly a staggering claim.

But unless I clone myself, which seems unlikely, my son David is likely to offer me my best shot at immortality.

Think about it.

There are precious few chances for normal folks like us to become immortal.

If you were Verdi you could write an opera. If you were Faust you could make an unsavory deal.

One sure path to eternal glory is to get a new creature named after you.

Olaf Rudbeck gave the great Swedish botanist Linnaeus his first job. In thanks, Linnaeus saw to it that Rudbeck became a flower, Rudbeckie hirta, the American black-eyed susan. Linnaeus wrote to his professor: "So long as the earth shall survive, and as each spring shall see it covered with flowers, the Rudbeckie will preserve your glorious name."

[There is an historical precedent to name unattractive plants after enemies. Johann Siegensbeck denounced Linnaeus as "lewd" and "loathsome" so Linnaeus retaliated by dubbing an "unpleasant small flowered weed" Siegensbeckia.]

Hugh Hefner, of Playboy fame, is reputed to have unsuccessfully offered a very large sum to name a newly discovered rabbit hefneri.

Some people have themselves frozen, awaiting the day when the illness they died from can be treated, and the troublesome effect of the freezing process itself can be reversed. This has the benefit that you will be around to live in person, although you'll probably be hopelessly out of date with the soaps.

But the surest path to immortality is via genetic success.

Women have always had significant control over their genetic partners. Singer Madonna, for example, wasn't shy about her search for a suitable stud whose sole purpose was to sire a child. The not so miraculous result: a healthy daughter named Lourdes.

While Madonna chose to do the leg work herself, other wannabe mothers with a line of credit can "catalogue shop" for those perfect genes in a "boutique sperm bank".

You can sperm shop on the web. "Donor sperm available free," is the title of one anonymous man's web-site, which is a variation, I guess, of what we used to euphemistically refer to as dating. [He is hardly alone in offering this service. In early 1999 Philippine President Joseph Estrada, after being asked if he was the father of a teen beauty queen, remarked "many women want to bear my children. It's O.K. They all are welcome."]

The cyber-savvy genetic philanthropist describes himself as "Caucasian, 6 ft tall, with black hair, fair skin." In 4th grade he won 3rd place in a school science fair with a project entitled "Using Red Cabbage Juice to Determine Acidity." As an adult he has been "awarded more than 10 patents for various inventions." His web-site shows cute photos of babies he has fathered, and perhaps some of them might reach similar heights as dad, whose 9th grade science project was "A Computer Program for Simplifying Boolean Expressions."

The original outlet for super-sperm-shopping is The Repository for Germinal Choice, which bills itself as "an activity of the Foundation for Advancement of Man". The California-based Repository is widely referred to as the Nobel Sperm Bank since it includes Nobel laureates and other "superlative donors". Although donors are anonymous (and unpaid), one donor went public: inventor of the transistor William B. Shockley, controversial for his theory that blacks are genetically inferior to whites.

Several years ago I wrote to the Repository's founder, Robert K. Graham, an opthamologist who invented the scratch-resistant plastic eyeglass lens. I was fishing for information (and maybe an invitation to donate), he was fishing for a prince, writing: "I have long admired the thinking of the Duke of Edinburgh [at that time I worked for WWF-World Wide Fund for Nature, and Prince Philip, also known as Duke of Edinburgh, was WWF's international president], as well as his splendid physical presence, and should be glad to consider him as a donor if he were willing." I sent the letter to Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace. Don't know if he forwarded a condom filled with royal sperm.

Even without the Duke of Edinburgh, women in need of high quality sperm had a dizzying array of options offered by the Repository. Donor No. 28, for example was "voted the best-looking man in his department." He sails and hikes. He twice scored 800, the highest possible, on the mathematics section of the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Minor drawback: "Slight hemorrhoids." Or, if myopia and dental malocclusion are no problem, Donor No. 27 offers "Remarkable intellectual ability (professor of mathematics), excellent character and health, and high fertility." He is tall (6' 1"), with dark brown curly hair (no balding!), enjoys a good sense of humor, likes playing with children, and possesses an IQ of 206 measured at age 8.

I wonder whether Graham might have read Roald Dahl's novel Uncle Oswald, in which an attractive female sperm-obtainer named Yasmin used a "Sudanese fly" aphrodisiac to collect sperm from James Joyce, Puccini, Henry Ford, Monet, even asexual George Bernard Shaw, for re-sale to upwardly-mobile would-be mothers.

Whatever Graham's inspiration, he bases the Repository's efforts on the warnings of the late Nobel laureate Hermann Joseph Muller, who wrote: "If the human species was to keep from regressing, natural selection had to be replaced with artificial selection." Muller, a University of Texas geneticist, theorized that a special sperm bank could "conserve intelligence." He also thought that his creation of the Repository was more significant than the research on mutations that won him a Nobel Prize. After his death, however, Muller's widow Thea withdrew her husband's support for Graham's sperm bank. Referring to the fact that the first recipient was a convicted felon and that the second was unmarried, Graham said "the embarrassing circumstances of the first two births made [Thea Muller] think we weren't doing things quite right."

The eugenics movement in America and Europe corresponded with the development of standardized IQ-tests. Supporting the concept that intelligence was mostly inherited and that people deficient in it should be discouraged from reproducing, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes promoted state sterilization in a 1927 Supreme Court decision. His supporters argued that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." Hitler, of course, pursued this social policy with ghastly zeal, and today eugenics scares the hell out of a lot of people. It's understandable that not everyone thinks that Graham's idea is terrific.

Ann McMillan Nunes, of Santa Clara, California, describes herself as "the product of a 'Nobel sperm bank'" where the donation came directly from her father (Edwin McMillan, winner of the 1951 prize for chemistry) to her mother. "I am reasonably smart and reasonably happy, but I am not smarter, richer, or happier than anyone else," she says. "What bothers me about the sperm-bank idea is that I fear women will believe that obtaining Nobel genes for their children is more important than having a father present when their offspring are growing up. In my case, it was not my father's Nobel prize that brought joy to my childhood but his presence. He was always there, sharing his wit and humor, giving me things to think about, and listening when I had something to say. It was my father, not his genes, that made my childhood special."

So, what's the answer? Nature or nurture? Cloning or gene flow? Either way, a kid's the fast lane to immortality. Providing he has some kids of his own. Start procreating, David.