Meet the Creepy Fellow Who Fathered Some 600 Children →
Bertold Wiesner ran the clinic with his wife Mary Barton, who may have had no idea that her husband was fathering tons of kids right under her nose. During their run at the clinic, they helped women conceive around 1,500 babies. They promised to give these women smart offspring by using “high IQ donors,” and their customers were under the impression that they used sperm donations from “a small number of highly intelligent friends.” That certainly sounds dubious in this day in age, but back then this kind of practice wasn’t nearly as formalized—though the clinic was considered controversial in its time because the practice of artificial insemination was still taboo.
Scandal isn’t totally new to the clinic, either. it was the subject of a previous dust-up eleven years ago, when it was revealed that sperm from Derek Richter, a neurochemist, had been used to father more than 100 children. But that now pales in comparison to Wiesner’s contribution, was only discovered recently, after two men, Barry Stevens and David Gollancz, who’d been conceived at the clinic, began researching it and discovered what was going on. DNA tests have now been conducted on 18 of the people who were conceived there between 1943 and 1962, and it’s clear that two-thirds of them were fathered by Mr. Wiesner.
The Free Market.
