-Caveat Lector- Sorry if someone has already posted this, it wasn't apparent from a quick scan of my inbox. These are the sort of important stories I post daily at http://leviathan.weblogs.com Bookmark it! Spam your friends about it! http://www.theage.com.au/news/2001/02/25/FFX5QXC6KJC.html The search for the Super-race By STEVE DOW Sunday 25 February 2001 They were the '80s Superbabies. And the search is on to find them, and to find out if they have inherited the genetic legacy of genius. Reputedly, the Superbabies were prime specimens of intelligent human beings born at the eerily named Repository for Germinal Choice, with just a hint of the dark and shade of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. But this was no fictional spoof on science gone mad. This was real. In 1982, southern Californian tycoon Robert K. Graham began his program of offering sperm from prime candidates - Nobel laureates, scientists, musicians, entrepreneurs - and more than 200 babies were born from the donations over the next 17 years. His motives were purportedly altruism and scientific curiosity. Many of the Superbabies are now Super teenagers, and will soon be Super adults. And now they face the enormous pressure of living up to expectations of brilliance. With advances in reproductive technology, and the release this past week by the Human Genome Project and the Celera corporation of two versions of the human genetic blueprint, such experimentation is likely to occur again, experts say. Perhaps human cloning of geniuses is the next logical step. In this post-genome world, three years after Graham's death - and more than a year since the repository closed - the magazine website Slate has launched a cyber-hunt for the 229 Superbabies, and the donors who gave away their sperm. Graham's program sparked enormous controversy, with scientific fascination about the extent of genetic influences weighed under cries of Nazi-style eugenics. Only one of Graham's Nobel donors, transistor inventor William Shockley, admitted contributing sperm. But Shockley's right-wing views on race did little to alter perceptions that Graham's program was about human supremacy. Demonstrators flocked to protest outside Graham's private estate. One donor who came forward last week, an entrepreneur in his late 40s who fathered at least four children who would now be in their late teens, said he had never had contact with his offspring. The entrepreneur told Slate that he would often see Graham socially at his house during the '80s, and he would often harass this particular donor for more sperm because of his popularity with women on the program. "(But) he was extremely warm, almost emotional about it. He was absolutely focused on it. He had that kind of unbridled enthusiasm. "But I never could really understand why he was so fixated on this idea of breeding - especially because he had such an average mix of kids himself." According to Slate journalist David Plotz, Graham, a self-made multimillionaire who made his fortune by inventing shatterproof eyeglasses, was a pessimist about mankind's future. He feared mankind was "in danger, (arguing that) over millenniums, nature's brutality had strengthened the human gene pool, allowing the strong and smart to reproduce", says Plotz. But, Graham argued, "once man mastered his natural environment, he jumped the evolutionary track. Better living conditions allowed 'retrograde humans' to reproduce". The medical director of Monash IVF, Gab Kovacs, says the likes of Graham's program would not be acceptable in Australia because of its eugenics taint. The underlying hypothesis - that smart genes produce smart babies - had never been proven scientifically. Professor Kovacs, who has matched up 3000 Victorian couples with donor sperm, says intelligence is never used as a criterion here. Instead, matching the physical characteristics of the husband is paramount - thus requests and matching of sperm are based on age, racial background, blood type, build, and hair, skin and eye colors. For the past five years, prospective parents have been able to choose their donor on the basis of non-identifying physical characteristics. Helga Kuhse, of Monash University's Centre for Human Bioethics, says she has a distaste about Graham's motivations and the possible motivations and expectations of those who made use of the sperm stored by him. But she has "no in-principle reservations about parents wanting 'to do the best' by 'their' child". Professor Kuhse predicts that the release of the human genetic blueprints will lead to more experimentation with child selection. There is widespread denial, however, by the scientific fraternity that human cloning per se is just around the corner. "While many people think that attempts to do the best by 'our children' is fine, if we focus on the prevention of certain genetic or other conditions, they will want to say that 'enhancement' is morally wrong," says Professor Kuhse. "I am not so sure, firstly, that a clear distinction can be drawn between 'disease' or 'deficit' on the one hand, and 'enhancement' on the other; and, secondly, that enhancement 'for the sake of the child' is always morally wrong. "We seek to do the best by our children when we provide them with a good education; if this is right, what makes it wrong to provide them with a good set of genes?" But Professor Kuhse says the George Bernard Shaw anecdote of more than a half century ago - indicating the role of luck in being born smart - is paramount. "If prospective parents do not understand about `reproductive roulette', they may well have unrealistic expectations and not value the child for its own sake. This is a danger." According to Ainsley Newson, of Melbourne's Murdoch Children's Research Institute's ethics unit, however, Graham's work was not eugenics in the typical sense. Rather, it was "about increasing people's reproductive options, not decreasing them". "There was no coercion or denial of freedom involved." In the end, Robert K. Graham never fully realised his own dream for humanity. Graham - who kept walls full of baby pictures of the "genius" offspring - was rejected by many parents when he sent out periodic surveys in the 1990s to assess the children's intellectual development. Their interest in genetic genius, apparently, did not match his. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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