He decided in his seventies to declare publicly, in the Los Angeles Times, that he had donated his sperm to a project that was attempting to create a sperm bank of Nobel Prize winners. When Playboy magazine asked him about it in a lengthy interview, he defended the idea; at least to him, a sperm bank of superachievers made perfect sense. When he was asked in the interview how his own children turned out, he replied, “In terms of my own capacities, my children represent a very significant regression. My first wife—their mother—had not as high an academic achievement standing as I had.”
