A new era in human reproduction
In a gleaming fertility clinic somewhere in California’s Silicon Valley, a doctor peers through a microscope at a translucent sphere—barely larger than a grain of sand. It’s a human blastocyst, the earliest form of life just five days after conception. Within that cluster of cells lies an entire genetic instruction manual—46 chromosomes, thousands of genes, and roughly six billion base pairs of DNA.
Until recently, scientists could read only fragments of this code to screen embryos for devastating hereditary diseases like cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s. But now, a growing number of biotech startups claim they can do far more: predict complex traits such as intelligence, appearance, and even temperament.
To their backers—many of whom are high-profile technologists and venture capitalists—this represents the next frontier of human optimization. To their critics, it’s a dangerous echo of eugenics.
As MIT Technology Review reported in its in-depth feature “Can You Curate a Perfect Baby?” by journalist Julia Black, the field is racing far ahead of scientific consensus and ethical oversight.
From disease prevention to designer traits
Since the 1990s, in vitro fertilization (IVF) patients have used preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) to screen embryos for single-gene disorders or chromosomal abnormalities. The goal was straightforward: reduce suffering and increase the odds of a healthy pregnancy.
Now, a new iteration—PGT-P, or preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic traits—is changing that narrative. Instead of identifying a single mutation, PGT-P analyzes the subtle interplay of thousands of genetic variants to predict complex outcomes like height, educational attainment, or disease susceptibility.
The first PGT-P baby was reportedly born in 2020. Since then, hundreds more have followed, as the practice slowly edges from laboratory experimentation into the consumer marketplace.
Companies like Genomic Prediction, Orchid Biosciences, Nucleus Genomics, and Herasight have all entered the fray—each promising to give parents an unprecedented degree of control over their child’s genetic future.
Silicon Valley’s billion-dollar bet
Behind many of these companies stand some of tech’s most powerful figures. MIT Technology Review noted that early investors and enthusiasts include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.
For $2,500 to $8,000 per embryo, these companies claim to assess thousands of genetic factors linked to health risks and personality traits. Orchid, for example, offers a “Whole Genome Embryo Report” that claims to sequence more than 99% of an embryo’s genome, detecting predispositions to disorders like diabetes, schizophrenia, and hypothyroidism.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by 25-year-old Kian Sadeghi, markets its technology with striking confidence. For $24,999, parents can access Nucleus’s full “IVF+” package—complete with embryo analysis, concierge fertility services, and polygenic trait comparisons that include eye color, height, and even IQ.
“Maybe you want your baby to have blue eyes versus green eyes,” Sadeghi told an audience at the company’s launch event. “That’s up to the liberty of the parents.”
His critics, however, see something else entirely.
Science meets ideology
While the technology is marketed as empowering and personalized, geneticists caution that its scientific foundations remain shaky.
A 2021 paper from the European Society of Human Genetics stated bluntly that “no clinical research has been performed to assess its diagnostic effectiveness in embryos.” A more recent study in the Journal of Clinical Medicine warned that “no comprehensive evaluations” exist to validate these tests’ ability to predict psychiatric or non-disease-related traits.
Polygenic scores—the statistical models these companies rely on—are based largely on genetic data from people of Western European ancestry, making them far less accurate for other populations. Environmental and social factors further complicate any prediction.
“It’s like trying to predict the shape of a wave based on a handful of water molecules,” says Dr. Sasha Gusev, a geneticist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “You can’t separate genetics from context.”
A familiar shadow: eugenics reborn?
For many ethicists, the deeper concern is not scientific validity but philosophical drift. The idea that human worth can be optimized through selective breeding has a dark lineage.
The term “eugenics”—coined in the 19th century by Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin—once inspired policies of forced sterilization and racial hierarchy. Today’s embryo-selection startups insist they are motivated by personal freedom, not coercion.
“This is nothing like eugenics by its popular understanding,” one researcher told MIT Technology Review. “It’s about giving people informed choices.”
Still, the rhetoric around “genetic optimization” and “intelligence enhancement” has found sympathetic audiences in far-right online circles, where biological determinism is often used to justify inequality.
In one especially provocative event titled “How to Create Superbabies,” political philosopher Jonathan Anomaly—who previously published a paper called “Defending Eugenics”—described what he called an impending “reproductive revolution.” He predicted that emerging technologies like in vitro gametogenesis could soon allow parents to generate hundreds of embryos in a lab and select the “best” among them.
“You might have a moral intuition that this is wrong,” Anomaly said, “but when elites are doing it privately … the dominoes will fall very quickly.”
An ethical and social fault line
Public opinion remains sharply divided. A 2024 U.S. survey cited by MIT Technology Review found that while 70% of respondents supported genetic testing for health-related conditions, only 37% approved of using it to enhance intelligence.
The debate has drawn new lines across politics and science alike. Progressive geneticists like Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden argue that acknowledging heritable cognitive differences could improve social policy—by better tailoring education and healthcare to individual needs. Others, like Gusev, warn that this reasoning risks legitimizing social inequality as biological destiny.
“If we start thinking of differences as fixed at birth,” Gusev cautions, “we risk abandoning the idea that society can make a difference at all.”
The future of reproduction—or a dangerous illusion?
For now, there are no long-term studies tracking children born through PGT-P. No one knows whether these predictions will hold true—or how these “genetically optimized” children will see themselves in adulthood.
“We’re still in the infancy of understanding polygenic testing,” says one reproductive geneticist. “But the marketing has already outpaced the science.”
As MIT Technology Review concludes, the rise of embryo selection forces us to confront profound questions about identity, ethics, and inequality. Are these technologies a tool for compassion—or a modern mirror of humanity’s oldest hubris?
The answer may depend not just on what the science can do, but on what society decides it should.
