Silicon Valley parents screen embryos in search of ‘baby geniuses’: report

Silicon Valley parents are shelling out as much as $50,000 to screen their embryos — to figure out which is most likely to grow into a “baby genius,” according to a report.

Some are even pushing a eugenics program to birth an entire generation of hand-picked brilliant babies in hopes they’ll turn out clever enough to save humanity from the threat of artificial intelligence.

It might sound like an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” but high-performing babies are a growing obsession among wealthy tech executives – and they’re willing to pay big bucks for it, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Startups Nucleus Genomics and Herasight charge $6,000 and up to $50,000, respectively, for their genetic testing of embryos – including IQ predictions – for couples using in vitro fertilization.

“Silicon Valley, they love IQ,” Kian Sadeghi, founder of Nucleus Genomics, told the Journal.

“You talk to mom and pop America…not every parent is like, I want my kid to be, you know, a scholar at Harvard. Like, no, I want my kid to be like LeBron James.”

Simone and Malcolm Collins, leaders of a pronatalist movement advocating for larger families, work in tech and venture capital and have four children through IVF.

Simone said they used Herasight to choose the embryo she is currently pregnant with because of its low cancer risk – though they were also thrilled to learn that he was in “the 99th percentile per his polygenic score in likelihood of having really exceptionally high intelligence.”

They plan to give him the middle name Demeisen, after a character from the science-fiction novel “Surface Detail” – who runs a warship called Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints.

A Bay Area couple have chosen to pursue IVF despite its costs and challenges in an attempt to root out the risk of Alzheimer’s and cancer that runs in their families. 

But the couple, both software engineers who call themselves “fairly typical for computer people,” also care about the IQ predictions.

They used a Google spreadsheet to break down the results from Herasight, ranking the importance of each trait.

“What percent additional lifetime risk for Alzheimer’s balances a 1% decrease in lifetime risk for bipolar?” they wrote.

“How much additional risk of ADHD cancels out against 10 extra IQ points?”

The embryo with the highest total score – which also had the third-highest predicted IQ – became their daughter.

IQ testing has become the backbone of a new eugenics movement led by Tsvi Benson-Tilsen.

Benson-Tilsen, the son of a rabbi and mathematician, said he spent seven years researching ways to keep AI from destroying humanity – before concluding it wasn’t possible.

Now he’s arguing that widespread genetic testing can be used to create a generation of geniuses to save humankind from AI.

“My intuition is it’s one of our best hopes,” said Benson-Tilsen, who co-founded the Berkeley Genomics Project, a nonprofit supporting the movement.

He said he wants to “enable parents to make genomic choices” – arguing that this element of choice is a key difference from the twisted history of government eugenics programs under Nazi Germany.

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In Silicon Valley, it’s already mainstream for tech executives to shell out thousands of dollars on professional matchmakers or send their kids to pricey preschools that require entrance exams.

“Right now I have one, two, three tech CEOs and all of them prefer Ivy League,” Jennifer Donnelly, a high-end matchmaker who charges up to $500,000, told the Journal.

“They aren’t just thinking about love, they’re thinking about genetics, the educational outcomes and the legacy.” 

This obsession with “genetic optimization” has sounded off alarm bells for bioethicists, who warn the testing is unfair.

“It is a great science fiction plot: The rich people create a genetically super caste that takes over and the rest of us are proles,” Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University, told the Journal.

It’s questionable whether these IQ predictions are even accurate – likely only able to make a three- or four-point difference in a child’s IQ, according to Shai Carmi, associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

“It’s not going to be something to make your child a prodigy.”

Parents who turn to the technology could also face unintended consequences, like selecting other traits that come alongside the likelihood for high IQ.

“If you’re selecting on what you think is the highest IQ embryo, you could also be, at the same time unwittingly selecting on an embryo with the highest Autism Spectrum Disorder risk,” said Sasha Gusev, a statistical geneticist at Harvard Medical School.