There is a feeling amongst some people who use donor insemination, and perhaps among the providers of the service as well for all I know, that the personal characteristics of the donor will to some greater or lesser extent determine the personal characteristics of the child conceived in this way.

If you believe that the donor makes a great difference in this respect then it is perfectly natural that you should be more curious about him and be irked by the secrecy that surrounds the donors' identities in Britain. There is a desire in some quarters to change this aspect of DI and I can only guess that it is parents' and children's belief in the heritability of major non-physical characteristics that fuels this. If anonymity goes can selection be far behind. In America the identification of donors has led to parents selecting them by characteristics which it is assumed may be associated with the genes of the donor.

What do we know about this most controversial of scientific debates, that of nature vs nuture?

An analogy that is frequently used in this debate is that of the good cake. Suppose that the raw ingredients are the heredity components and that he preparation, baking and decoration and presentation are the environment which these ingredients are subjected during the production of a good cake. Can you say what percentage of the goodness of the cake is due to the ingredients? Genes and environment interact from the very start of development but because they are qualitatively different there may be little point in trying to discover which is more important.

Nevertheless it is intriguing to look at the evidence which does exist. One of the problems of matching donors to DI fathers is that so few external features of people can be relied upon to be dominant. None of the few that have been suggested, such as eyelash length, ear lobe attachment curliness of hair, or even the classic blue eyes being recessive to brown eyes are inevitable. The surprising thing about most children, identical twins excepted, is not how similar they are but how different given the same genetic parents.

On the otherhand certain genetic diseases carried by men are highly predictable, unpleasant and avoidable by screening out these donors. Might it be that more complex characteristics such as musicality or aggression are also genetic in part and therefore selectable? By insisting on knowing the identity of the donor could we as parents not select them on the basis of comparable intelligence, talent or personality?

Huge amounts of energy have been spent trying to unravel the contributions of nature and nuture as far as intelligence is concerned. One of the main stumbling blocks has been the way in which people have subverted the original idea of regularly checking a child's mental age in order better to direct teaching resources, and turned intelligence into some sort of fixed characteristic called IQ by which individuals could be classified and differentiated, as in the 11+ test.

The prime difficulty of course lies in the problem of measuring intelligence satisfactorily, in other words identifying those characteristics which go to make up what we generally regard as being intellectually able. This is a controversial subject in itself, but taking the current intelligence tests as a crude measure, how is this score influenced by our genes? Early studies concentrated on the difficult task of finding identical twins who had been reared apart so that the environment influence could be measured.

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