Medicine: Frozen Fatherhood

Future Americans may be the offspring of disabled or even long-dead fathers who foresightedly left their “germ cells” deep-frozen in an underground bank. Future parents may be able to leaf through a germ-cell catalogue and pick the father of their next child on the basis of “personifications of their own ideals—the generally admired primary virtues of high character, keen all-round intelligence, and sound physique,” and such traits as “a joyful disposition, musical proclivities, aptness at repartee, rapid calculation, courage or endurance.”

This is no Brave New World deliberately presented as a nightmare by a novelist, but the proposal outlined last week in all seriousness by Nobelist Hermann J. Muller to the American Institute of Biological Sciences. It is medical progress itself, said Indiana University’s Geneticist Muller, that has made such steps not only desirable but necessary. In former days, he argued, the harsh processes of natural selection kept the human species on the upgrade, but now modern medicine keeps alive the bearers of defective genes and enables them to reproduce.

Said Muller: “A lower-than-average native intelligence becomes ever less of a hindrance in surviving and having children, and so does a lower-than-average endowment of genes conducive to mutual aid and socially useful behavior . . . The principle of the equal sacredness of every life applied to man is ultimately incompatible not only with his progress but even with his survival.”

Dr. Muller fears that radiation—typically in atomic work or in high-altitude or space flight—could become an important source of defective human genes. He offered a two-part prescription. “A highly preferred position in regard to radiation protection” should be given the younger two-thirds of the population. And a seminal Fort Knox should be established for deep-frozen storage of the germ cells of men about to be exposed to more than average radiation.

With this as a starter, Dr. Muller thought society could go on to completely planned fatherhood, especially for couples “who are afflicted with sterility or a dubious genetic endowment.” He brushed aside administrative difficulties by arguing that “dictation, whether by politicians, physicians or geneticists, would tend to be self-defeating.” Dr. Muller was confident that, freezing would not damage sperm. But in one sketchily reported trial of frozen sperm, among the first three babies was a girl so deformed that the mother refused to take her home, and she proved to be mentally defective also.