A new episode of the podcast "Sex Appeal" traces the history of sperm donation from animal breeding to modern fertility treatment, with gynecologist and fertility specialist Dr. Eran Gold explaining how the practice evolved and why it remains tightly regulated. He says early artificial insemination grew out of livestock breeding, then gradually moved to humans, but for centuries it was hidden, stigmatized, and opposed by institutions such as the Catholic Church.
Gold describes early human cases, including a 15th-century story about Henry IV, who allegedly struggled for 13 years to impregnate his wife and was rumored to have had another man’s sperm used after she gave birth to a daughter. He also recounts the first documented successful artificial insemination in the 18th century, when Scottish physician John Hunter advised a London cloth merchant to inject warmed semen into his wife, resulting in a pregnancy. In the 1920s, insemination became more organized and legal, but doctors still chose donors for couples, often from students or soldiers, based on appearance, education and character, while keeping the donor anonymous and allowing a single man to father hundreds of children.
The big shift came in the 1960s through the 1980s, when sperm could be frozen and commercial sperm banks emerged. Gold notes that this created an entire industry and later, in the 1990s, more oversight. He also points to social change, as women began demanding access for single women and lesbian couples, helping drive the rise of single parenthood by choice.
The episode highlights extreme cases of so-called super donors. One U.S. project in California, founded by millionaire Robert Clark Graham from 1980 to 1999, promised children conceived from Nobel Prize winners’ sperm and high-IQ mothers. It produced 220 children, but no evidence that they were geniuses. More recently, DNA testing, cheap since 2010, has undermined anonymity and exposed donors who fathered 500 to 1,000 children or more. Gold cites Israel’s 2025 warning that a deceased donor, active between 1974 and 1985, carried a Lynch syndrome mutation, and says recipients were told to notify their children and seek genetic counseling.
He also mentions Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who is said to have more than 100 children from anonymous donations across 12 countries and has pledged to divide his reported $17 million fortune equally among them. Another high-profile case is Dutch donor Jonathan Jacob Meijer, the subject of a Netflix documentary, who is believed to have over 550 acknowledged children and perhaps more than 1,000 in total. In Israel, mathematician Ari Nagel, known as "The Sperminator," reportedly has 100 to 120 children, but courts blocked his attempt to donate in Israel by using a co-parenting agreement. Gold also recalls Indiana fertility doctor Donald Klein, who used his own sperm without patients’ knowledge in the 1970s and 1980s, fathering more than 90 children before losing his license.
