God of Sperm

Joe Donnelly

Description

Cappy Rothman is a well-known name in the medical world as well as the business world, with various news outlets and publications from both camps (Forbes, Vice, Medical Daily) still pulling him in for mentions and interviews to this day. 

The book is relevant to those interested in ethics, conception, medical ingenuity, and building a business. 

Cappy has a large network of friends and prominent names in the Los Angeles area. His medical office is located in Beverly Hills.

Sujets

• Medical
• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Rare Bird Books
• Date de parution: 06 décembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781644283523
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

This is a Genuine Rare Bird Book
Rare Bird Books 6044 North Figueroa Street Los Angeles, CA 90042 rarebirdbooks.com
Copyright © 2022 by Cappy Rothman
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic.
For more information, address: Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department 6044 North Figueroa Street Los Angeles, CA 90042
Set in Minion
epub isbn : 9781644283523
Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.


Contents
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Endnotes



Author’s Note
A t the summit of Mount Whitney, you have little choice but to focus on your breath because the altitude can take it away as surely as the scenery will. Topping out at 14,505 feet (and still growing), Mount Whitney is the highest point in the contiguous United States. In his younger days, Dr. Cappy Rothman made the summit three times, each time looking out at a world of expanding personal and professional horizons.
Cappy Miles Rothman has long appreciated the magnitude of nature and the multitudes it contains. For nearly a decade beginning in the mid-seventies, every August 12, he undertook a twenty-four-hour pilgrimage from his Pacific Palisades home to sleep under the stars on top of Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome. Every summer, he’d leave in the morning, climb in the afternoon, be at the summit by dark to watch the Perseids meteor shower, before descending the next morning. Looking at the cosmic fireworks, Cappy would ponder the infinite possibilities of the universe, the marvels of creation. He couldn’t help but see parallels in the Yosemite night sky with the wonders of the body’s inner space, particularly within the male reproductive system, which he’d begun studying in earnest during his medical residencies. Both contained billions of possibilities for generating life.
On top of Half Dome, Cappy must certainly have reflected on the time when a powerful US senator asked him to preserve his deceased son’s reproductive capacity, and on how he would later change the meaning of “life after death” by playing a critical role in the birth of Brandalynn Vernoff, the first baby conceived of sperm retrieved from a clinically dead man.
Rothman had already started what would become the California Cryobank by then. Arguably the world’s largest repository of human genetic material, the Cryobank is responsible for the conception of more than 230,000 individuals and counting. Soon enough, the number of humans who can trace their genetic legacy back to the California Cryobank may number in the millions. Its storage tanks hold enough frozen genetic material to repopulate a post-apocalyptic world, should such a time come. No surprise, Cappy Rothman is sometimes referred to as “the God of Sperm.”
What is surprising, perhaps, is that this is also the legacy of the son of a notorious gangster—a child who spent his formative years around colorful Mob figures during Miami Beach’s Magic City –era, a boy who shook Fulgencio Batista’s hand, and a young man who partied in Havana with the sons of Batista’s closest associates.
By the time Cappy started coming of age, his father, Norman Rothman, an erstwhile laborer and union man, had become Norman “Roughhouse” Rothman, a Mafia figure of growing interest to law enforcement and the FBI. Roughhouse cut a wide swath through the Mob’s infamous mid-century expansions into Miami, Havana, and Las Vegas. He would be linked, with varying degrees of veracity, to such notable figures as Meyer Lansky, Santo Trafficante Jr., Fulgencio Batista, and Jack Ruby.
The son of Norman “Roughhouse” Rothman could have become any number of things. Those who knew Cappy as a well-connected bon vivant in velvet pants with a twenty-carat smile, a cool car, and carte blanche at the top hotspots (Was Sinatra playing at the Fontainebleau that night?) wouldn’t have been surprised if he had maintained a certain momentum toward a life as a South Beach impresario, hotelier, or nightclub owner running a glamorous Cuban revue. A more whimsical possibility, given his childhood penchant for adopting castaway exotic pets, would have seen him opening a sanctuary for rescued animals on the edge of the Everglades.
So whatever Cappy Rothman might have done with his life, even his closest family and friends from back in the day would likely not have predicted that he’d become a groundbreaking doctor and controversial pioneer in the still-unfolding realms of male infertility, advanced reproductive technology, and an entirely new field of medicine called andrology. Rothman has likened his own contributions to “lighting a candle in a cave.”
This book, the story of a remarkable American life and one man’s profound impact on how we have children, is the product of much research, many interviews, and some helpful feedback—not to mention a successful Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the FBI files on Norman Rothman. Mostly, though, it’s a product of the many days Cappy hosted me at his lovely late-modern home in Pacific Palisades, high up a winding canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains. The house was a risk when he bought it—after years of internships and residencies, Cappy’s medical practice was just starting to take hold—but it felt very much like a piece of the American and Californian dreams Cappy had embraced.
We’d meet there in the afternoons, often in the backyard with a view over-looking the Pacific, talking either on the patio or under the gazebo next to the koi pond. More often than not, hummingbirds and bees buzzed around the garden while a sea breeze kept things cool. Inside, the house was tastefully decorated with Peter Beard and David Hockney originals, contemporary art, sculptures, keepsakes, and memorabilia Cappy and Beth, his wife of fifty-four years, have collected during their travels to more than seventy-seven countries around the world. The house reflects the confidence of self-made success without betraying any of the chest-puffing gaudiness that seems to accompany such things these days.
During these sessions, Rothman—tall, slim, garrulous, and mostly delighted with the way his unexpected life had turned out—told me of his metamorphosis from a scion of Roughhouse Rothman’s underworld enterprises to a man in the middle of dramatic changes, not just in the way we reproduce, but also in the way we think of the biology, ethics, and metaphysics of reproduction.
Parenthood is now possible for infertile couples, same-sex couples, single women, transgender women. In theory, a child can now be born to a couple from an embryo conceived of gametes culled from donor eggs and donor sperm, making it a four-person project. If a surrogate is called upon to carry the embryo, that would make five. Advances in reproductive medicine have, in fact, made it possible for just about anybody to have a baby.
Some say this is well and good and represents a democratization of reproductive possibilities that opens up pathways to parenthood for millions who otherwise would have been denied that opportunity. Others say we’re on the path toward the sort of commodification of reproduction that gets us one step closer to designer babies for the wealthy and mongrels for the rest. Whatever you may think of the ethical questions involving advanced reproductive medicine, or even if you think there are none, it’s clear that science has been boldly exploring the final frontiers of human creation.
Cappy Rothman has been one of the captains on that ship ever since he set sail from Miami Beach to the Naval Hospital Corps School in Great Lakes, Illinois, where his journey of discovery and self-determination took off in earnest. As such, he will signify different things to different people—innovator, iconoclast, hero to many, villain to some. To me, he came to embody the postwar American landscape, a time and place of expanding horizons and infinite possibilities. It’s hard to imagine his story taking place anywhere else.
What a journey.
—Joe Donnelly


Chapter 1
Life After Death
C appy Rothman was and is a huge Star Trek fan. The shelves in his home office are lined with collectibles—the Enterprise, Captain Kirk, “Bones” McCoy, Lieutenant Uhura. It probably won’t surprise you that Rothman’s favorite, and perhaps his biggest cultural hero, is Mr. Spock. “I like his character,” says Cappy. “He’s logical.”
It’s understandable that someone like Rothman, a futurist and a man of science, would appreciate Spock’s preference for logic over emotion. But let’s not forget that Spock was half human, and much to the chagrin of his Vulcan side, he too was occasionally swayed by emotion. “I think I’m the same,” says Rothman. “I happen to be very sensitive…but I do like his logic.”
Throughout his life, Rothman has taken Spock’s signature saying, “Live long and prosper,” to heart. He is, after all, a doctor whose enduring interest has been in the field of infertility, especially in the underappreciated (until relatively recently) male side of the conception equation: sperm.
Somewhere in the middle of this story, around the time major advances in reproductive medicine were igniting panic in some and a mixture of joy and relief in others, the possibility of turning Spock’s salutation upside down landed at Rothman’s door. The question it posed: Can you prosper even if you don’t live long?
It started when the chief resident of neurosurgery at the UCLA Medical Center (now the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center) called Rothman on behalf of then California Senator Alan Cranston. “Hey, Doc,” the chief res