Silicon Valley tech executives have taken a liking to a new genetic screening service that tests the IQ of embryos and allegedly allows customers to get “smarter” children.
The cost of such a service varies significantly: for example, the startup Nucleus Genomics offers it for $6,000, while testing from Herasight will cost up to $50,000. The latter was recently praised on social media by Elon Musk himself, is one of the largest fathers in the tech industry
Polygenic embryo screening (PES) is a service that is currently only available commercially and tests embryos for complex conditions, traits, and risks associated with common diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and mental disorders, among others, as well as traits such as height and intelligence quotient (IQ), according to the National Institutes of Health.
In the interview The Wall Street Journal, Jennifer Donnelly, a local “matchmaker” who charges up to half a million dollars for her services, says that more and more tech executives are looking for “smart” partners to create proper offspring.
“Right now, I have one, two, three CEOs of tech companies, and they all prefer the Ivy League,” Donnelly says.
One such “technological couple,” Simone and Malcolm Collins, have four children through IVF and used Herasight to analyze some of their embryos. The woman is pregnant again, and this time they chose an “optimal” embryo with a low risk of cancer and a high chance of “exceptionally high intelligence.” The Collinses plan to name the child Tex Demason, where the second part of the name is taken from the science fiction novel Surface Detail by Ian Banks in honor of the warship avatar.
Another couple of Silicon Valley engineers created a special system in a Google spreadsheet to evaluate the importance of each of the points in the genetic analysis. In the end, their daughter was conceived with the third highest predicted IQ and the highest overall score.
“It’s a great science fiction story: rich people genetically create a supercaste that takes over, and the rest of us are the proles,” says Hank Greeley, director of the Center for Law and Biological Sciences at Stanford University, referring to George Orwell’s 1984, where the term “proles” is used to refer to the non-partisan proletariat.
Obviously, these procedures have their critics, who, among other things, complain about the limited access to testing to the “rich circle”. Experts, on the other hand, worry about unintended consequences, as traits that some parents would not want their children to have may come with the selection of a high IQ.
“If you choose the embryo that you think has the highest IQ, you may also inadvertently choose the embryo with the highest risk of autism spectrum disorder,” Harvard geneticists say.
Earlier, ITC wrote about a new trend from San Francisco, where local entrepreneurs and IT professionals are everywhere carry AI voice recorders to record conversations as well as the controversial work practices in Silicon Valley, which adopts the “996” mode banned in China.
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