W Whoever descended Broadway’s stairs into the New York subway in November could hardly escape the gazes of the babies. Even on the poster above the stairs, a small brown body in a white onesie rests on the arms; the mouth half-open in astonishment, as if it already understood the promise above its head: “Have your best baby”, it reads, “Get your best baby.”
The U.S. startup Nucleus Genomics had New York covered with its message: stair treads, lampposts, and digital displays showing cute photos of children who could come from all corners of the world. “IQ is 50 percent genetic,” it proclaims, “height 80 percent.” So why, the campaign asks, shouldn’t you want more for your child? To have a bigger one. A smarter one. A healthier one.
In New York’s subway stations, the dystopian precursors of a beautiful new world have washed into real life. A world in which parents can determine more for their children than the wall color of their rooms, the crib slot, and the brand of baby formula. In this world, chance would no longer decide which person is born and whether that person must live with a hereditary disease.
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If it were only about what science makes possible, parents in Germany could already learn a great deal about their child before birth. Yet there are limits to how much they may know and what they may do with that knowledge. Borders that, for good reason, have been drawn tightly in a country where not even a hundred years ago people with disabilities were murdered.
Because of this, parents in Germany cannot simply have embryos created in a lab tested genetically, even for diseases that would certainly lead to miscarriage. Technically this has been possible for more than 30 years. Only if, due to parental predisposition, there is already a high risk of a serious hereditary disease may embryos be tested for it. What is considered serious is determined on a case-by-case basis by ethics committees. It is easier in Spain or Britain and nearly unregulated in the USA, where parents can even choose the sex of their future child during artificial fertilization.
Children of the Superlatives Are Conceived in Laboratories
But some researchers and startups, backed by tech libertarians of Silicon Valley, want more. They want to redraw the ethical and technical boundaries. And perhaps also redefine our understanding of what makes a human human. The children of the superlatives are conceived in laboratories. Thus prospective parents could first produce a selection of embryos and screen them for their traits. Faulty genes could be eradicated, perhaps one day even gene variants that do not occur in the family could be transmitted. So-called supergenes that are supposed to protect against diseases.
Rafal Smigrodzki and his wife Thuy were probably among the first to invest in one of the new technologies for family planning. He didn’t have to think long about the decision, he told the Wired magazine in 2022. A gene screen would seem to him the next logical step to give his child a long, healthy life. So the couple contacted Genomic Prediction in 2019, which at the time offered such tests as one of the first ones.
According to them, they could choose their child according to the greatest health potential, so that in adulthood the child would not suffer from heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. Each embryo would receive a score that measured its risk of disease compared with the other embryos and with the general population. Aurea won this competition when she was essentially non-existent. She was no more than a misshapen embryo, a few days old, hundreds of cells in size. She was born in Los Angeles in 2020, without severe hereditary diseases and bearing the burden of being, in some sense, the first—the first baby born on the basis of such a screen.
Imagine a world in which all people are completely healthy. In which all are reasonably intelligent and very smart. In which all people are rational and kind. Would that be a bad world?
Rafal Smigrodzki, Father
Such methods could make the world better, believes her father Rafal Smigrodzki. “Imagine a world where all people are completely healthy,” he says at the end of a video clip. “In a world where all people are equally intelligent and very smart. In a world where all people are rational and kind. Would that be a bad world? Would it be wrong to use technology to reach that goal?”
Since 2019, several other providers of such tests have appeared, the majority in the USA, supported by billionaires such as PayPal founder Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. They sell the idea of prevention and care. Projections see the market growing to 1.7 trillion dollars by 2034. Couples from various countries are expected to use this offering, which is not legal in their home countries. A German couple, Die Zeit reports, also selected embryos through such a procedure.
And it is no longer only about healthier children. Newer providers, such as Nucleus Genomics in their New York advertising campaign, also promise to predict the expected IQ or the height. Noor Siddiqui is the founder of the gene-screening startup Orchid and proclaims a future that will change the way people have children. “Sex is for pleasure and embryo screening for babies,” says the 31-year-old company chief in a video on X. “It will be crazy not to screen.” A lucrative business. At Orchid you pay two thousand five hundred dollars per embryo.
Who enters this world experiences something like grandiosity. Diseases should not be treated; they should not even arise in the first place. Some dream of a world completely free of disease and want to defeat death. Others see themselves as representatives of transhumanism. They want to create a new human, to push evolution forward technologically. For that, they are also willing to go further and rewrite the genetic code of humans.
Backed by tech billionaires such as Sam Altman, the CEO of the AI giant OpenAI, last year three startups ventured into a previously taboo topic: genetically altering embryos before birth. So far it is about research, not a service offered to parents.
In principle, much of what the companies promise has more to do with marketing than with scientific reality. In the startups’ vision, we simply need to understand enough about the body and its biology to improve humanity. If we can understand which interactions of genes promote or prevent cancer, how metabolism, mental illnesses, or even complex traits from intelligence to empathy are encoded, then we could influence all of that from the ground up.
But life is not predictable—even by a selection of perfect genes. What parents are sold with screenings can be imagined as shopping in a toy department, where every baby doll comes with a booklet of probabilities. There is no guarantee that these probabilities will be accurate.
What the Genes Really Reveal and What They Do Not
“I see many parents who believe that the genetic code yields more information about their children than it can actually predict,” says Anneke Lucassen, professor of genetic medicine at the University of Oxford. “I worry that people invest too much in genetics to predict anything.”
While some diseases such as sickle cell anemia or Huntington’s disease are triggered by mutations in a single gene, most diseases and traits arise from the complex interplay of many gene variants together with environmental conditions and personal behavior. This applies to mental illnesses, heart problems, obesity, or Alzheimer’s. And even more so for such complex traits as intelligence.
Already there is scientific dispute about how to define or measure intelligence. Genetics does have an influence on intelligence; how much, however, is completely unclear. For so many other factors influence intelligence—from air pollution in the neighborhood to diet to access to early learning opportunities. Separating them in studies is nearly impossible.
Where do the data come from that companies want to use to predict probabilities of diseases and intelligence? The basis are so-called genome-wide association studies. To understand the significance of genetic predisposition, researchers in biobanks looked for DNA variants and statistical clusters. Do carriers of this gene variant tend to live longer? Are depression diagnoses more common among them? Thus a catalog of probabilities was created. The polygenic tests rely primarily on two large biobanks, one in Britain and the other in the United States. Both largely sample white people of Western European ancestry.
Using these results to embryo selection would be, at best, premature, writes the European Society of Human Genetics in 2021 in a study. In reality, researchers use them to better understand disease mechanisms. So far, no clinical study demonstrates the effectiveness of predictive tests as offered by the companies, researchers criticize.
But even without scientifically proven effects, the gene-screening startups, with their advertising, reinforce a narrative: that there are good genes and bad genes; those to be promoted and those to be avoided or eradicated. And that is the logic of eugenics.
It’s the Manhattan Project of our generation
Cathy Tie, Founder
The founders, for whom the term can be too closely tied to history, resist embracing that label. They prefer talking about “super babies,” about “genetic optimization.” Eugenics, to them, carries too much weight with horrific human-rights abuses, the T4 program, the Holocaust, and decades of global coercive sterilization. What matters, they insist, is that technologies are not used by authoritarian governments for discrimination. The choice of whether parents want a boy or a girl, or a blue-eyed or brown-eyed child—this, they say, should be their free choice.
Yet in a merit-based society, that freedom is not unlimited. Even the providers themselves push in a direction. Intelligence seems more valuable than lesser intelligence; being taller appears more valuable than being shorter. It is understandable that parents want to give their children an advantage to succeed. That’s why they send them to good schools whenever possible. Some give their child a German-sounding name in the hope of experiencing less racism. Or tell their sons to stop crying because it does not fit the male image that yields social success. All these understandable personal decisions crystallize into social differences—the more the social safety net is lacking.
So it is only likely that parents, if they could, would want to give their children a genetic edge. Such a test “appears to offer the best price-performance ratio; it costs less per year than a private school,” a couple anonymously told the Guardian in December. But what if the parents’ choice extends beyond eye color and involves lighter or darker skin tones? Several studies show that people who explain social group differences with genetics or biology tend to have more racist attitudes. They attach beliefs like certain groups being more or less intelligent, more or less capable.
If Genes Are to Blame, Politics Must Change Nothing
How we explain human behavior has political consequences. If we explain problems in school by social circumstances, the demand is to change those circumstances. If we explain them by a genetic “that’s how they are,” society can more easily justify why some people work in better jobs and others in worse ones.
The possibility that people could decide who comes into the world and who does not sounds threatening. But we already do that in many places. Across the world, girls are missing. Encouraged by prenatal diagnostics that determine fetal sex more safely and earlier in pregnancy, many have not been born over decades. In Denmark, for example, 95 percent of pregnancies with a positive Trisomy 21 test result end in abortion. In Germany, the blood test for trisomies in pregnancy is paid for by health insurance.
One can see this as a sign of an ableist society or as self-determination. But if it is allowed to examine the fetus’s genes for severe disabilities during pregnancy and then terminate the pregnancy if necessary, is it logical that such tests should be prohibited for embryos before implantation?
Are Tests Legitimate If They Prevent Miscarriages?
Besides trisomy 21, Down syndrome, there are trisomy 13 and trisomy 18. The reason these variants are less well known is that most babies with these chromosomal conditions die in the womb or shortly after birth.
Miscarriages entail physical and emotional risks for the pregnant person. Isn’t it legitimate not to want that? And if it is legitimate, where is the line?
Carriers of a mutated BRCA gene stand a much higher chance of developing cancer at some point in their lives. For the affected women, the risk of developing breast cancer by age 80 is about 70 percent, nearly six times higher than the general population. For men, the risk of developing prostate cancer increases. If such cases have occurred multiple times in a family, perhaps even losing a parent to the disease, they may wish not to pass this risk on to their children. Simply having the gene does not mean a diagnosis, only a probability. Still, it is understandable to opt for an embryo without this variant.
And if it is safely possible to use the CRISPR/Cas gene-cutting tool to transform a sick embryo in the lab into a healthy one—would that be simply a tabo o or also a chance? There is no right to a congenital disease, said medical ethicist Jochen Taupitz already ten years ago at the Ethics Council.
The Ethics Council and its work in Germany illustrate that we have long since not done everything we technically could. The techno-determinism of Silicon Valley pretends that technologies dictate the course of society. Once created, they cannot be stopped. But reproductive medicine shows that is not the case. After 1978, when the first baby conceived by artificial insemination was born, laws governing embryos and artificial conception emerged around the world. Not everything that is possible is allowed everywhere.
Already in 2018, the Chinese researcher He Jiankui created three genetically modified babies. Secretly, on his own. His case sparked a wave of outrage; the procedure was highly dangerous at the time, and He Jiankui went to prison for three years. Since then, the global consensus in research has been to refrain from genetically modifying human embryos.
Until now, when three startups have announced that they will return to the topic. They want to find out whether there is a safe way to rewrite genes in embryos. One idea: inscribing “supergenes” at the start of pregnancy. These are gene variants believed to protect humans from diseases—such as Alzheimer’s. A familiar figure, He Jiankui, is also involved again. After briefly showing remorse, he has returned. He already sees himself as the hero in a lab coat who protects humanity from disease. In 50 years, he hopes, he will not be seen as Dr. Frankenstein but as “China’s Darwin.”
Many Eugenicists like to invoke Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest: those best adapted to their environment survive; they are the drivers of evolution.
This often translates into social life. Those who can adapt to social conditions, who possess the traits considered valuable, move forward and may live longer if needed. But the Darwinists forget what makes humans special: instead of merely adapting, humans can reshape the niche in which they live. Toward a society in which people are allowed to be themselves in their differences.
Reducing suffering should certainly be the aim of any sane society. The path there, however, cannot involve simply removing people who suffer. For what is desirable—where illness begins and where health ends—these are not neutral measures of nature. They are human decisions, shaped by social ideas that can change.
The Technology Is Definitely Very Powerful, Says the Founder
The 30-year-old Canadian entrepreneur Cathy Tie is the founder of one of the new companies that genetically modify embryos. She has already started several biotech firms, one of which offers genetic tests for adults. Among other things, she is a partner in a project that, according to her own statements, is working on creating unicorns, where horse embryos would receive horn genes. Cathy Tie was briefly in a relationship with He Jiankui, which ended quickly after she could not travel to China and he could not leave.
Now she wants to genetically modify embryos. The technology is definitely very powerful, Tie told the magazine Wired, describing it as akin to “the manipulation of the atomic nucleus and the manipulation of the cell nucleus.” She named her company Manhattan Genomics, drawn from the secret U.S. government program in World War II that led to the first atomic bomb.
“It is the Manhattan Project of our generation,” says Cathy Tie. Even with the atomic bomb, researchers sought to make the world better; then their invention cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Afterwards, people agreed on the goal of never using the technology again.
