The journalist David Plotz investigates the strange history of the Repository for Germinal Choice, popularly known as the Nobel Prize sperm bank—an ambitious and controversial attempt at eugenic human breeding in late-twentieth-century America. Founded in 1980 by the millionaire inventor and optician Robert Graham, the repository set out to raise the intelligence of the human race by collecting the sperm of Nobel laureates and other exceptional men and making it available to carefully screened, high-achieving women. Over its two decades of operation the bank produced more than two hundred children before closing in 1999. Plotz, whose reporting on the subject began as a series for Slate, sets out to discover what actually became of the enterprise: who the donors really were (few Nobel winners in fact participated), who the mothers were, and how the children—now growing up—had turned out. His inquiry becomes a detective story as he tracks down anonymous donors and their offspring and, remarkably, helps arrange meetings between children and the biological fathers they had never known. Along the way Plotz uses the repository as a lens onto much larger questions: the seductive and disturbing history of eugenics, the ethics of sperm donation and assisted reproduction, the mysteries of heredity and the limits of genetic ambition, and the emotional needs of donor-conceived children to know their origins. Reported with curiosity and a light, often wry touch, The Genius Factory is both an account of a bizarre chapter in American science and a thoughtful exploration of what we believe we can engineer in our children—and what we cannot.