Courtesy of Jon Cohen in Science ("The Chimpanzee Genome Project's Seedy Origins"), a detail that I hadn't heard before:
To begin, [Pieter] de Jong asked Yerkes for a sample of chimp sperm, and researchers there chose Clint—not because he was a hardy male representative of Pan troglodytes or had some other meaningful attribute. Clint, it turns out, became the genome chimp because he was particularly fond of providing sperm samples.
Apparently it all started with Evan Eichler, who needed to make a bacterial artificial chromosome with chimpanzee X chromosome sequence.
