Mapping the God of Sperm (400 children)

[underpants]

http://www.newsweek.com/id/227104?GT1=43002

When Maxey was a medical student at the University of Michigan, his first wife, a nurse at a fertility clinic, persuaded him to start donating sperm to infertile couples. Maxey became the go-to stud for the clinic because his sperm had a high success rate of making women pregnant, which brought in good money for the clinic. Maxey himself made about $20 a donation, but says he was motivated to donate more out of a strong paternal instinct and sense of altruism. "I loved having kids, and to have these women doomed to wandering around with no family didn't seem right, and it's easy to come up with a semen donation," he says. "You would get a personal phone call from a nurse saying, 'The situation is urgent! We have a woman ovulating this morning. Can you be here in a half hour?' "

Maxey, now the CEO of Cayman Chemical, a 300-person global pharmaceutical company, says back then he just "didn't think about it a lot." He didn't have to. When he began volunteering, he wasn't asked to take any genetic tests and received no psychological screening or counseling. He merely signed a waiver of anonymity, locked himself in a room with a cup and a sexy magazine, and didn't consider the emotional or genetic consequences for another 30 years. Both his cavalier attitude and the clinic's lax standards, Maxey says, explain why he may have so many offspring. But now a fierce conscience is catching with his robust procreative drive. When he's not running his company, Maxey has become a devoted advocate for better government regulation of the sperm-donor business. He is also making his genome public through Harvard's Personal Genome Project, and hopes that the information collected there might one day help his offspring and their mothers. "I think it was quite reckless that sperm banks created so many offspring without keeping track of their or my health status," he says. "Since there could be that could have to know information about my health, this is my effort to correct the wrong."

Maxey began donating before sperm banking became the big visible business it is today, where single women and couples can purchase STD-free, Ivy League, celebrity-look-alike sperm that has been quarantined and meets FDA mandates. But, in the '70s and '80s, the business operated behind a veil of secrecy. A man could clandestinely make some extra cash by donating to an infertile couple, and more often than not the ob-gyn, not the prospective families, would choose the sperm—his favorite tennis partner, perhaps, or in the case of Kirk Maxey, the handsome, blue-eyed, Nordic husband of his nurse.

Clinics are now struggling to answer some of these questions. In October, The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that a 23-year-old donor used by a San Francisco sperm bank passed on a potentially deadly genetic heart condition to nine of his 24 offspring, including one who died of heart failure at the age of 2. The sperm bank now gives electrocardiograms to screen for genetic heart diseases among potential donors.

[MineralMan]

1. Very interesting story. It's worth reading the entire story at the

link. BTW, the two women in the photo are two of his offspring.