Tomorrowland (30 page)

“Follow your weird,” said author Bruce Sterling. Well, mission accomplished. We followed, all right. Out of the muck and onto the land. Down from the trees and over the veldt. Across oceans and continents, then skies and
stratospheres. We’ve chased it back in time and into distant space, and don’t get me started on other dimensions. We tracked it out of science fiction and into science fact and we’re not done yet. Oh yeah, we followed our weird. Followed it right into Tomorrowland.

1.

The world’s largest collections of stored genetic materials are found in Sussex, England; Spitsbergen, Norway; and Los Angeles, California. Sussex hosts the Millennium Seed Bank, which houses some 750 million species of plant seed. Spitsbergen, an island less than 600 miles from the North Pole, is the site of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which safeguards — inside a tunnel, inside a mountain — every variety of the earth’s twenty-one major food crops. And Los Angeles is home to the California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the world, which stores enough human seed to repopulate the planet several times over. The first two of these projects are international efforts to preserve our genetic future; the last is a private enterprise run by a man known to many as the King of Sperm.

The King wears Buddy Holly glasses. He is of medium height and medium build, balding, sixty-nine years of age, with a penchant for flashy shirts and comfortable shoes. His name is Dr. Cappy Rothman and “Cappy” is not a nickname. It is the colorful moniker given to him by his colorful father — if by colorful one means mobbed up.

The King of Sperm began his career in casinos. His father, Norman “Roughneck” Rothman, ran the San Souci Club in Havana, so Dr. Rothman spent his teenage years in Cuba. One of his earliest jobs was ferrying money — in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist — between Cuba and banks in the States. One of his later jobs was working as an organizer for Jimmy Hoffa — to raise extra cash for medical school at the University of Miami.

Medical school led Rothman to a residency at the University of California in San Francisco, where he studied under the legendary
urologist Frank Hinman Jr. Hinman liked to assign his students yearlong research projects on medical mysteries. How sperm got from testicle to outside world was Rothman’s assignment for his first year of medical school. In his second, it was the mechanism of erection. Both are considered infertility problems. “I loved infertility immediately,” says Rothman. “There was so much we didn’t know. I felt like a pioneer.”

By 1975, that pioneer was board-certified in urology and took a job at the Tyler Clinic, becoming Los Angeles’ first male infertility specialist. A few years later, the Tyler clinic folded and Rothman went out on his own. The California Cryobank was born.

In 1977, Rothman published the very first article on sperm banking in the
Journal of Urology
. That was also the year a prominent US senator’s son was killed in a car crash. The statesman contacted Rothman and asked if his boy’s sperm could be saved. In 1978, because of the work he’d done on the senator’s son, he published the first article on postmortem sperm retrieval, later appearing on
Oprah
to explain the procedure.

Despite these accolades, what Rothman remembers most about starting up his business was a young couple who came to see him. “The man was infertile and the woman was angry. In the middle of that discussion, she turned to her husband and said, ‘Because I married you, I’ll never be a mother.’ It was a statement I never wanted to hear again. Then and there, I decided to open a sperm bank.”

2.

If you adjust for size, the distance sperm must swim from testicle to ovum is the equivalent to that of a human running from Los Angeles to Seattle. Because of serious concern about transmission of diseases like AIDS to unborn children, and the drastic rise of what is known as “single mothers by choice,” the human seed in the King of Sperm’s collection now travels much farther — serving women in all fifty states and some twenty-eight countries.

This is no thin slice of the pie.

In the United States, the fertility industry is an annual $3.3 billion business, with sperm banking accounting for $75 million of that. Thirty percent of that business flows through the California Cryobank, but even these numbers do not truly capture Rothman’s influence. Frozen sperm and eggs — which the California Cryobank also stores — are the first step in assisted reproduction, so wherever the sperm-and-egg-bank business goes, so goes the rest. As Rothman himself points out, “When California Cryobank makes a decision, some six months later the rest of the industry tends to follow.”

Increasingly, these decisions are no small thing. For almost four decades, the sperm banking industry has operated almost completely without outside influence. Beyond a series of somewhat bizarre FDA rulings (more on these later), there is no top-down governance. The industry is, as it has always been, self-policing. Which means that California Cryobank and a few other key players wield enormous influence over the future of childbirth.

Right now, that future is uncertain. A growing pile of ethical, legal, and biological issues now surround the industry: the problem of donor anonymity; rules involving genetic diseases occasionally passed on by sperm and egg banks; the prevention of accidental incest between half brothers and half sisters; and strange quandaries resulting from a government increasingly using science to play politics. Will the government step in is the question. Because, until they do, the people profiting most from the future of childbirth are actually the people shaping the future of childbirth.

3.

California Cryobank’s headquarters sit in a two-story office building in West LA, specifically designed by Rothman to resemble a set from
Star Wars
. But it’s a little bit of overkill. Seriously,
who needs sci-fi window dressing, when there’s actual sci-fi technology.

Outside the building, for example, stands a 6,000-gallon nitrogen tank and a backup generator capable of providing six months of emergency power. Inside, just past the receptionist, sits a large, rectangular room: the home to ten cryotanks, each containing 20,000 color-coded ampoules of sperm. Each ampoule holds up to 60 million sperm, with the color-coding determining the ethnicity of the donor. In other words, just off the lobby of the California Cryobank, is enough sperm to refertilize the earth several times over.

Just down the hall from the cryotanks are the masturbatoriums — the little rooms where prospective donors jerk off. There are three masturbatoriums to choose from: erotic, less erotic, and not so erotic. Perhaps because Rothman is a bit old-fashioned, or perhaps because the masturbatoriums were designed by a woman from the marketing department, the photographs that wallpaper these rooms, especially when measured against today’s Internet porn standards, are downright tasteful.

“For some guys,” notes Rothman, “it doesn’t take much.”

It may not take much to finish one’s business in these rooms, but it takes quite a lot to get into them in the first place. To become a donor at California Cryobank, one must submit to what Rothman calls “the most rigorous prescreening process in the field.”

This process begins with a college education because, without one, California Cryobank doesn’t want your sperm. A long conversation follows, where donors are filled in on the obligations that come with the job — specifically its year-and-a-half-long commitment. During that commitment, donors are paid seventy-five bucks a pop, with two to three pops a week required, meaning a guy stands to earn anywhere from $11,000 to $17,000 for his services.

If those terms are acceptable, two separate semen samples are taken and analyzed. “We’re looking for very fertile men,” explains Rothman. Normal sperm count is 20 million to 150 million sperm
per milliliter of semen. By “very fertile,” Rothman means over 200 million sperm per milliliter. Sixty percent of those sperm must be motile and must look as sperm are supposed to look.

If all of this is shipshape, a three-generation genetic history is taken. More semen is obtained and screened for diseases. Most sperm banks test for 23 variations of the mutation that causes cystic fibrosis, while California Cryobank, known for their rigor, looks for 97. Jewish donors are screened for Tay-Sachs, African American donors for sickle-cell anemia. A complete physical is then taken, followed by a six-month quarantine to assure that slow-developing HIV is not lurking in the sperm — one of those ideas that originated at California Cryobank and has since spread to the rest of the industry.

After this waiting period, donors start producing. “We see them twice a week for semen, we see them once every three months for an updated battery of STD tests,” Rothman says. “We get to know them pretty well along the way.”

But the major problem facing the industry right now isn’t how well sperm banks get to know their donors — it’s how well prospective parents get to know their donors.

4.

Here in the twenty-first century, we shop for kids via catalog — “donor catalog” to be exact. These catalogs are thick, usually including a description of donor eye color, ethnicity, and education level, a psychological profile, personal essays, and even audio interviews. Occasionally, adult photos are included and California Cryobank has just added baby pictures as well. But the one thing prospective buyers are never permitted to know is the donor’s name.

Donor anonymity is the bedrock of the business and, as a result, as Jane Mattes, a New York psychotherapist and founder of Single Mothers by Choice, an organization that represents the
fastest-growing group to utilize frozen sperm, says, “the most crucial issue facing the industry today.”

While the industry maintains continual contact with its donors during the sperm-collection phase, California Cryobank and others have no way to keep track of donors after their tour of duty is done. Illness is the problem. There are plenty of diseases that don’t manifest until later in life, yet most donors are college students who have yet to get sick. Furthermore, though most sperm banks are rigorous in their predonation screenings, many donors don’t know their own genetic history. Others lie to conceal it.

Add in the fact that nobody demands that cryobanks stay in contact with donors; that banks don’t have to tell new clients about health concerns among donors’ prior children or release any follow-up medical information about a donor; that, traditionally, sperm banks destroy donor records to preserve anonymity after the bank is done selling their sperm, and — as the saying goes — you have the makings of a quagmire.

This quagmire has led to problems, like those facing Brittany Johnson. In 1988, Diane and Ronald Johnson used California Cryobank sperm — from a man known only as Donor 276 — to conceive their daughter Brittany. The problem with 276’s sperm was an exceptionally rare kidney disorder known as autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease, a late-onset ailment that typically doesn’t appear until after age forty — but one that usually requires a kidney transplant by age fifty. It is possible that Donor 276 didn’t know he was a carrier (though this seems unlikely, since his grandmother died from it and his mother and aunt also suffered from it). Either way, when Brittany got sick at age six, she became what the media dubbed the “test case for sperm gone wrong.”

It became a nasty fight. The Johnsons alleged that California Cryobank knew the truth about Donor 276 — though Rothman strenuously denies this — and went out of its way to conceal it.
And Brittany may not be the only sick child around. Between 1984 and 1988, Donor 276 made $11,200 for himself by donating over 300 specimens, and court documents suggest the bank sold nearly 1,500 vials of Donor 276 sperm to an unknown number of women before being taken off the market in 1991.

While the facts of this case remain murky (it was settled out of court in 2003 and some records remain sealed), the resulting hoopla brought similar problems to light. There is the widely reported story of Donor 1084 at Fairfax Cryobank in Virginia, the second largest cryobank in America, whose sperm carries a rare platelet disease and has resulted in a half dozen sick children up and down the East Coast. Also at Fairfax, Donor 2148 carried a rare genetic immune disorder that has already infected one of Donor 2148’s twenty-three known children. Then there’s Donor F827, from International Cryogenics in Michigan, who fathered somewhere between five and eleven children and all with a rare blood disease that leaves carriers at serious risk for leukemia.

And this list goes on and on.

The answer that many are pushing for is to ban donor anonymity. But this brings problems of its own. In 1984, Sweden outlawed anonymity, and so severe was the drop in potential donors that Swedish women began traveling to Denmark for sperm, giving rise to what is now known as reproductive tourism. And the same thing happened in New Zealand. In 2005, when England outlawed anonymity, donor numbers dropped by 84 percent. On an island of 22 million men, fewer than 200 are now willing to bank their sperm. After the law’s passage, Clare Brown, chief executive of the Infertility Network UK, told reporters, “Clinics across the country are having to close because there is a shortage of donor sperm — and that constitutes a crisis.”

In the US, that crisis is following an even stranger path. In 2005, while England was banning donor anonymity, a donor sperm–born teenager named Ryan Kramer decided he wanted to know his father. So he swabbed his cheek and sent the DNA
sample to an online genealogy testing service and soon became the first person in history to use Internet DNA services to track down a lost parent.

There were two immediate reactions to Ryan Kramer’s quest — the first by the sperm-banking industry. “We removed a bunch of information from our donor profiles,” says Cappy Rothman, “making it a lot harder for people like Ryan to track down their fathers.” The second was the creation of a number of organizations dedicated to chipping away at donor anonymity and a number intent on washing it away completely.

In the chipping-away category is the Donor-Sibling Registry, founded in 2000 by Ryan Kramer’s mother, Wendy. “I started the website as a Yahoo message board,” she says, “to give these donor kids a place to go to try and find their half brothers and half sisters.” For the first two years, the registry totaled thirty-seven members; then word started to spread. By 2003, the site’s popularity had grown so much that Wendy removed it from Yahoo and created a dedicated site (
donorsiblingregistry.com
), which now has 8,500 members.