# Robert K. Graham **Robert Klark Graham** (June 9, 1906, Harbor Springs, Michigan – February 13, 1997, Seattle) was the optometrist-turned-industrialist who made a fortune in shatterproof plastic eyeglass lenses and spent it on the most literal eugenics project of the postwar era: the **[[Repository for Germinal Choice]]**, the "Nobel Prize sperm bank," which he opened in Escondido, California in 1980 to breed a cognitive elite. His 1970 book *The Future of Man* laid out the fear — that welfare and medicine had suspended natural selection and the "retrograde" were outbreeding the gifted — and the remedy, which was to make genius available by the vial. ## The Repository Graham's original plan was sperm from Nobel laureates only; three signed up, and the one who went public, the transistor's co-inventor and race-science evangelist William Shockley, gave the bank its name and its notoriety. By 1983 it had nineteen "genius" repeat donors, most of them not laureates; by its closure in 1999, two years after Graham's death, **218 children** had been born under its auspices. David Plotz's tracing of them found ordinary, mostly happy people and a founder who had never followed up. The bank won the first Ig Nobel Prize in Biology (1991). Its lasting effect was on the fertility industry rather than the gene pool: it introduced the donor catalogue — height, IQ, hobbies — that every sperm bank now uses. ## Why he matters here Graham is in the vault as [[John Tanton]]'s correspondent and as the practical end of the [[Pioneer Fund]] circle. In a September 18, 1996 letter to Graham, Tanton wrote: "Do we leave it to individuals to decide that they are the intelligent ones who should have more kids? And more troublesome, what about the less intelligent, who logically should have less?" — the plainest surviving statement that Tanton's [[Passive Eugenics]] was hereditarian in content and not merely demographic. The line from the Repository to the present runs through polygenic embryo screening and the tech right's [[Pronatalism]], which have made Graham's project a consumer product. See [[Eugenics]] and [[Dysgenics]] for the ideas, [[Richard Lynn]] for the data, and [[Society for Genetic Education]] for the organization. ## See Also - [[Repository for Germinal Choice]] · [[Eugenics]] · [[Dysgenics]] · [[Passive Eugenics]] · [[Pronatalism]] - [[John Tanton]] · [[Richard Lynn]] · [[Pioneer Fund]] · [[Society for Genetic Education]]