The father of a Toronto filmmaker may have fathered between 600 and 1,000 children, thanks to 19 years of generous sperm donations.
The dad in question, Bertold Wiesner, a British scientist and Austrian Jew, ran a fertility clinic in London.
Allegedly, Wiesner provided an estimated 20 sperm samples a year to reproductively-challenged middle and upper-class men. The Daily Mail reported Sunday that of the 19 children conceived at the London fertility clinic who had their DNA tested in the past decade, two-thirds of them shared the same father.
If the ratio holds true, of the 1,500 babies conceived at the clinic between 1943 and 1962, close to 1,000 could indeed be filmmaker Barry Stevens’ half-siblings.
Thanks to minimal sperm donor limtations in North America, shared half-sibling stories of this magnitude are rare, but not unexpected. Still, the legacy of Wiesner’s seed might create a network of international brotherhood, atypical of European culture.
Sperm donor sagas also make for great movies, like last year’s Genie Award-winning Quebecois comedy Starbuck, a profile of a perpetual adolescent who inadvertently fathered 533 children anonymously.
Similarly, Stevens, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, has already produced two features on the subject; 2001’s Emmy-nominated Offspring, and 2009’s Bio-Dad.
Wiesner – or Daddy ‘Starbuck,’ if you will – died in 1972, at 70.
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Joanna Adams writes for Toronto Standard. Follow her on Twitter at†@nowstarringTO.
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