Medicine: Superkids?

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Many Nobel winners are taking a dim view of Graham's project. Stanford's Burton Richter (Physics, 1976) reports that his students are beginning to ask whether he supplements his salary with stud fees. "It's somewhat weird," he says. "What they are trying to do is create an intellectual superman, and selecting winning Nobel Prize scientists is not the way to do it." Charles H. Townes (Physics, 1964) of the University of California at Berkeley dismissed the project as "snobbish," and the Salk Institute's Dr. Renato Dulbecco (Medicine, 1975) disqualified himself. Said he: "I was vasectomized long ago."

What of the moral considerations? Among other things, says Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings, N.Y., Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences, the plan assumes that brighter is better, and that the Nobel Prize is a rough index to social usefulness. Says he: "There's no guarantee that high IQ people produce better people or a better society. It is not the retarded kids of the world who produce the wars and destruction." Graham's project may not even make good sense on its own terms. Nobel sperm may be bright, but the donors are usually far along in years. Shockley, for example, is 70, and recent studies suggest that the chance of having a mongoloid child increases not only with the mother's age, but with the father's too, especially if he is 55 or older.