Reproductive Tech That Promises Smart Babies Is Peddling Soft Eugenics

The reproductive tech company Orchid recently launched a genetic test that promises a whole genome sequencing report for embryos. It is the first such test commercially available to couples undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) and claims to detect things like congenital disabilities, neurodevelopmental disorders, chromosomal abnormalities, and even future cancers.

The company has been accused of aiding parents, including Elon Musk, in also screening for “intelligence.” While Orchid has denied this, other companies like Nucleus Genomics and Heliospect Genomics have been more explicit in their offerings — Heliospect Genomics boasts that its screening methods can boost a future child’s IQ by more than six points. Nucleus Genomics’s newest New York City subway ads provocatively claim “IQ is 50% genetic” and “These babies have great genes” (we’ve heard that one before).

Since the advent of prenatal genetic screening, disability justice advocates have warned about how the practice necessitates a biological standard for a “good life,” one that inherently devalues the lives of those who are disabled, and how that “good life” will increasingly only be available to the wealthy. With companies like Nucleus and Heliospect offering embryo intelligence testing at five-figure price tags, their goal seems to be a Gattaca-style genetic enhancement of the ruling class.

These companies are building on scientific research that makes connections between genetics and traits of interest, including intelligence. These studies are rife with caveats that limit their interpretation, yet are being used not only to sell what some are calling a “soft eugenics” but also by white supremacists. As a geneticist and a Black woman, I am alarmed by the resurgence of such pseudo-scientific ideas and concerned by how scientists have contributed to it, often unwittingly.

My peers must do more to counteract the weaponization of genetics research by extremists.

Researchers often look at how certain genetic variants correlate with the presence of a trait. The largest study to date for intelligence, published in 2018 and widely cited, uses educational attainment as a proxy and purports to explain the “inheritance” of obtaining a college degree with predictive scores.

What studies like this don’t account for is the impact of the environment. In reality, parent educational status remains the strongest predictor of child education and, given that parents typically provide both genes and environment, it is nearly impossible to disentangle the two. As a result, the predictive power of these scores is almost certainly grossly inflated. That is, if highly educated parents screen for the smartest embryo and end up having a highly educated child, is that because of the screening or because they were undoubtedly going to have a highly educated child anyway?

In fact, studies of identical twins who get separated at birth and raised apart show how strongly social factors influence “intelligence” — a recent study found that IQ can vary largely between twins, differences attributed primarily to schooling. Furthermore, our IQs are not static but rather shaped by our daily habits. And for some, the internalization of stereotypes within negative environments can stunt potential in measurable ways.

These findings confirm beliefs of the creator of IQ tests himself, French psychologist Alfred Binet, who worried that these tests perpetuated prejudice regarding the “educability of intelligence.” Although originally developed by Binet to tailor support to students with intellectual disabilities, IQ tests have since come to be seen by many as a measure of innate intelligence and long-term educability and success. This is despite several limitations, including their failure to measure crucial life skills, such as emotional intelligence and creativity, and a bias toward Western educational standards. Treating IQ and educational attainment as innate measures also ignores critical socioeconomic factors shaping these outcomes and thus perpetuates false beliefs about the innate inferiority of minority groups.

Scientists must take a hard look at the potential unintended consequences of their work.

Another thing these companies do not tell you: All these studies are based on associations. And correlation does not equal causation. We also have no idea what other, potentially unwanted traits might be associated with a predictive score.

Furthermore, these scores do not transfer well outside of the ancestry groups they were generated in, usually Europeans. As of 2021, over 85 percent of genetic studies have been done in groups of European ancestry. Genetic studies vastly undersample from Africa, the most genetically diverse continent in the world. This means that companies are generalizing based on a skewed pool of genetic information.

Studying traits like intelligence has long been of interest to eugenicists, who promoted race-based pseudoscience to justify a myriad of violent, discriminatory policies. Claims about the biological inferiority of Africans to Europeans, including apparent smaller brain size, were used to support chattel slavery and forced sterilizations of Black women through the 1980s. Fears about polluting the gene pool with “inferior races” drove anti-miscegenation laws and the Immigration Act of 1924 barring immigrants from Asia.

While it is true that intelligence is at least partially impacted by genetics, scientists and companies that attempt to distill smarts down to a genetic footprint provide fodder for eugenics arguments by influential public figures.

In the U.K. and most European countries, screening embryos for IQ is illegal.

In October, Donald Trump referred to Democratic Representatives Jasmine Crockett and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “low IQ,” claiming that they could not pass the “very hard” aptitude tests he apparently “aced” at a recent medical check-up (these were not in fact IQ tests, but rather a routine dementia screening).

That same month, leaked messages from a chat of Young Republican group leaders included a text that said “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there.” This echoed the words of the late Charlie Kirk, who said that several prominent Black women, including Harvard law-educated Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.”

The aforementioned 2018 study even found its way into the screed published by the 2022 Buffalo, New York, shooter, who killed 10 Black people at a supermarket.

My peers must do more to counteract the weaponization of genetics research by extremists. As geneticist Jedidiah Carlson and colleagues argued in a 2022 paper in Nature, scientists should clearly denote what proportion of total human genetic variation is represented by the populations used in their analyses. As most studies vastly undersample from the African content, this number is bound to be small. Furthermore, scientists across the world must commit to increased sampling of the ethnic groups across the African continent to better capture its diversity. Diverse sampling in studies across outcomes is needed to illuminate important differences — and similarities — in disease risk across populations. Such diverse sampling has transformed our conception of a disease like sickle cell anemia from being a “Black disease” to one that varies regionally, including across the African continent, with malaria incidence.

U.S. legislators should bar IVF companies from making promises that are not only false but also ethically and morally repugnant.

Scientists must also take a hard look at the potential unintended consequences of their work. The New York Times recently reported that sensitive data from a National Institutes of Health study of adolescent brains was accessed by fringe researchers who rank ethnicities by IQ.

Meanwhile, other problematic research in the mainstream continues full steam ahead. Since 2015, the GWAS catalog reports that more than 100 genetic studies on education and intelligence have been published. In November, a study on genetic associations with educational field choices was published in Nature Genetics, a top genetics journal. At the very least, authors must make the probability of environmental influences clear, not just in a paper’s discussion section but also in its data tables and figures.

We also need to address the so-called soft eugenics of reproductive tech companies. In the U.K. and most European countries, screening embryos for IQ is illegal, with the European Society of Genetics condemning the use of predictive scores for screening embryos as an “unproven, unethical practice.” U.S. legislators should bar IVF companies from making promises that are not only false but also ethically and morally repugnant. Instead, they should support legislation that helps educators, parents, and communities provide a supportive learning and emotional environment.

It’s time to take a hardline stance against soft eugenics and instead build a world where babies of all backgrounds and abilities can thrive to their fullest potential.