Cecil Jacobson

In 1992, Jacobson was convicted of 52 counts of mail fraud, wire fraud and perjury. He was sentenced to five years in prison and had his medical license revoked. Jacobson appealed his convictions and sentence, but they were upheld by the court of appeals. He later moved to Provo, Utah, where he was involved in agricultural research.

He was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for Biology in 1992, which cited him as "Dr. Cecil Jacobson, relentlessly generous sperm donor, and prolific patriarch of sperm banking, for devising a simple, single-handed method of quality control."

In 1989, suspicious former patients tipped off a local television station, which investigated and reported on the false pregnancies. Jacobson was sued by numerous patients. Federal prosecutors charged Jacobson with perjury (for false testimony during the civil proceedings) and mail and wire fraud (for the use of the letters and the telephone system as part of his fraudulent practice).

In the 1980s, Jacobson operated a reproductive genetics center in Fairfax County, Virginia. He specialized in treating women who had difficulty getting pregnant, or problems carrying a pregnancy to term. One form of treatment was to inject patients, before and after conception, with the hormone hCG (commonly used as a parenteral fertility medication and a hormone normally released during pregnancy), and patients who had been unable to conceive with other treatments reported success under Jacobson's care.

In the 1960s, Jacobson, who was Chief of the Reproductive Genetics Unit at George Washington University Medical School, claimed that he had impregnated a male baboon; he had supposedly implanted a fertilized egg from a female baboon into the male's abdominal cavity. He claimed that he had terminated the pregnancy after four months, but never published his results in scientific publications.

Cecil Byran Jacobson (October 2, 1936 – March 5, 2021) was an American former fertility doctor who used his own sperm to impregnate his patients without informing them.