He also donated his semen to the controversial Nobel Prize sperm bank, officially known as the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was designed to exclusively stock the sperm of Nobel laureates (but which later expanded to include other so-called geniuses). This sperm bank for geniuses – founded in 1979 by an optometrist called Robert Graham, who started it because he believed that human beings were turning into idiots – ran for 20 years, and produced 217 children. Only three laureates were known to have actually donated sperm (Shockley being one of them, and the only one to reveal his
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