Top Silicon Valley tech executives are forking out thousands of dollars in a bid to breed America’s smartest babies, a new report claims.
Parents and “tech futurists” are paying up to $50,000 for a new genetic-testing service that promises to screen embryos for IQ, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Jennifer Donnelly, who charges up to $500,000 for her services as a high-end matchmaker told the Journal she has seen a notable rise in the amount of tech execs who are looking to pair up with intelligent partners to subsequently get “smart offspring.”
“Right now I have one, two, three tech CEOs and all of them prefer Ivy League,” Donnelly said.
Startups including Nucleus Genomics and Herasight have started to publicly offer IQ predictions, based on genetic tests, to help people select which embryos to use for in vitro fertilization, The Journal reports. In the Bay Area, popularity for the exclusive services is high, with testing priced around $6,000 at Nucleus and up to $50,000 at Herasight.
Last month, Elon Musk expressed his apparent enthusiasm in the idea when he responded “Cool” to a post about Herasight.
Polygenic embryo screening – PES – is a service that is only currently available commercially, and tests embryos for complex conditions, traits, and risks attributed to common conditions, such as diabetes, cancers and psychiatric disorders, among others, as well as for traits like height and intelligence quotient (IQ), according to the National Institutes of Health.
Critics have raised questions about the ethics of such testing. Potential issues include the oversight over which conditions are tested, who chooses them, what level of uncertainty in the results is acceptable and whether the service only be used by those who can afford it.
“Is it fair? This is something a lot of people worry about,” said Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University to The Journal. “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.”
And Sasha Gusev, a statistical geneticist at Harvard Medical School, added: “I think they have a perception that they are smart and they are accomplished, and they deserve to be where they are because they have ‘good genes.
“Now they have a tool where they think that they can do the same thing in their kids as well, right?”
