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October 21, 2024 - 11:50am
An American start-up is now offering embryo screening for IQ, plus “the other naughty traits everyone wants”, including sex, obesity, and propensity to mental illness. The company, Heliospect, is the latest in a wave of offerings that promise parents the power to engineer their own offspring: a prospect that raises a host of new philosophical, political, and interpersonal questions. Meanwhile, the origin of the story, in footage recorded as part of an undercover investigation by the Guardian and “antifascist” doxxing ring Hope Not Hate, points toward a new conservatism of the Left — albeit one that will likely prove as futile in the face of technological change as its Right-wing predecessor.
Heliospect’s product is, according to the report, still in “stealth mode”. While it doesn’t provide IVF services, it promises “pre-implantation genetic screening” of existing fertilised embryos based on data supplied by prospective parents. The news of a commercial company offering this service has triggered fears on both Left and Right, concerning human stratification via the “rise of the superbaby”, as well as the objectification implicit in treating humans as plastic material for engineering: Hope Not Hate’s report warns of “a new age of eugenics”.
We might also ask: how would such expensive interventions affect the parents’ relationship to, or expectations of, the resulting child? There isn’t a one-to-one relationship between genetic code and genetic expression, meaning we’re not “programmed” by our DNA, as some popular accounts suggest. Instead, DNA reflects a range of possibilities that may or may not be expressed, depending on complex contextual factors.
In turn, this suggests that you could select your embryo for IQ, and then find they still turned out to be more the sporty type. If you were so keen to optimise your kids for success that you spent thousands on tweaking their DNA ahead of gestation, would you still love them if they turned out a bit average? You can hardly send your 10-year-old back to Heliospect for a refund.
But importantly, too, the reporting reveals how radical a challenge such advances pose to contemporary Left-wing ideology. The Guardian quoted a progressive bioethicist who warned that such technology “reinforces the belief that inequality comes from biology rather than social causes”. This echoes a broader Left-wing dogma, according to which the problem with eugenics isn’t biological — that is, Left-wingers don’t believe it actually stratifies the human species — but ideological, in that it “naturalises socioeconomic inequality” and hence creates a political obstacle to tackling the (in reality, social) causes of inequality.
Yet if “naturalising socioeconomic inequality” is bad enough, the likely impact on Left-wing dogma is still more seismic if baby engineering works. In effect, Leftist arguments against eugenics amount to an assertion that egalitarian blank-slatism is so morally and politically sacred that we shouldn’t even go there — an assertion repeated still more forcefully in relation to research on genetics and what is euphemistically referred to as “human biodiversity”.
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SubscribePlease get rid of nCHAPTCHA. It’s insulting.
Left-wing rearguards work pretty well. They’ve banned conversion therapy for homosexuals who want help to become straight. (Even as they urge surgery for minors so they can become trans.)
Relatedly, Iceland has almost eliminated Down’s Syndrome because mother’s can have tests performed to see if their infants will be born with it.
Social determinism is a fundamental tenet of Progressive ideology. Anything that threatens it has no chance.
Lysenko is apparently still alive and well in Ireland.
If you’re going to make outlandish claims whilst unable to tick a box or two without whingeing about it, at least get your facts straight.
Testing for Down’s Syndrome is commonplace across the Western world, including routinely in the UK:
div > p:nth-of-type(3) > a”> div > p:nth-of-type(3) > a”>Screening tests in pregnancy – NHS
Only 1 or 2 babies are born in Iceland each year with Down’s Syndrome, because of the termination of pregnancies after screening.
Did anybody mention eugenics? I didn’t….
Neither did J Pade.
Ticking a box is one thing. Having to follow up by ticking photos, as I had to in my comment above, which themselves get things wrong, is another. Btw, how many robots has this system uncovered?
I dont know about Unherd, but my own noncommercial webserver gets roughly 80% traffic from bots, 60% of which are some form of attack. It is a huge problem.
The testing gave parents a license to terminate pregnancies; it did not end Down’s itself. At least be honest about what you are saying and perhaps advocating.
Iceland have done very well to eradicate Downs Dyndrome. It’s costly for parents and costly for the taxpayer
I have no problem screening for Downs. But cost is not a good argument. Old people are very costly – even fairly healthy ones.
Denmark is another country that has eliminated Downs Syndrome children. I really don’t know what to think about this. I understand, the child might have a severe case, parents’ reluctance to take on the responsibility and costs. There are also fears about what will happen to the child/adult when the parents die. Although I support a women’s right to an abortion, this makes me nervous that parents will abort i if the embryo is the wrong sex—like India and China (and also gay couples when the surrogate is carrying a female embryo/fetus). Social engineering scares me.
Yes it does… Government control scares me more though…
The name of this outfit “Heliospect” says much about it’s philosophy in attempting to further fiddle with nature down at the chromosomal level. One wonders whether the word root for the sun (helio) observes (spect) the zygote in a benign way to provide nourishing care. Unfortunately too much sun or too little can have disastrous effects on plants and equally humanity, the sum of which is made up of many millions of zygotes susceptible to solar radiation. I hope and wish this startup becomes bankrupt. Before then let us observe the Guardanistas/New York Timists and Telegraphites/WSJites get taken to the cleaners and end up with offspring who hopefully will not be too much of a drain on our disability services.
I’m sure Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao each had a really high IQ. Who wouldn’t want to make a few more of them?
I’ll dust off my old VHS of Boys from Brazil.
David Reich wrote in the NYT in 2018 ‘“I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science.”
As for screening for IQ, how is that possible?
There are already services which provide potted descriptions of the donor’s resume, including their college education, etc. Wasn’t there some fuss a while ago about a couple of gay guys who had got a surrogate baby that they admitted they had selected for an egg from a mother who was a model who had gone to fancy college? So, “Heliospect” are most likely just a standard Silicon Valley start-up trying to raise a buck by claiming to do something that has already been done, but “make it tech” to separate fools from their money.
Just wondering.,if you pay them a fee up front and Im sure you do,then they screen your batch of embroyos what incentive is there for them to say,,all this batch are really thick,these potential babies are going to grow up dumbkoffs,don’t bother. But if they pick out and identify one you’ll be so happy. The truth is they just picked one at random as no test in this world or in any algorithm can identify a smart embryo. In fact if you’ve paid quite a few thousand dollars etc you’ve already identified yourself as dumb anyway.
That occurred to me too. Not that I particularly support testing of vanity products on animals, but I would have expected to see published reports of “researchers breed super-intelligent rats using embryo screening” before a product starts to be marketed for humans.
Theranos v2.
There would be ethical issues with breeding super intelligent rats. They would make all the other rats feel inferior.
The line is that Downs Syndrome foetuses should be allowed to live. And screening for intelligence is morally wrong. Sci fi…..
And it’s not even possible so some outfit is having a laugh and rubbing their greedy hands.
50 years ago my cousins wife had the standard amnioscentisis test and it showed their first baby was going to be Downs. It was assumed and expected by the medical authorities and even a tranche of relations that she would immediately have a procedure and have this alien growth removed. She refused. She fought heaven and earth to keep her baby and James died last year. He was very Downs ,after the age of 30 he had to go in a specialist home. His parents paid privately,must have cost a fortune. But that boy/ man was loved. We can’t know the inner life of other people who can’t tell us. But people loved him. Sadly my cousins wife died about the same time as her son,the deaths not linked,life just happens like that. It’s tragic. It’s what makes us human.
What could possibly go wrong here?
I’m sure there will be no unintended side effects from experts tampering with the human genetic makeup and selecting out those they don’t like.
Also again why do the progressives always seem to end up back at Eungenics. They started there in the early 20th century with their lobotomies, and now they go right back to it with their “designer” babies.
Mark my words good will not come of this.
I believe Rudolf Hess got a Nobel Prize in 1949 for his work on lobotomies.
Not many people know that.
No … that was Walter Hess.
Walter Rudolf Hess.
Ah. I thought he must have had a lab set up in Spandau Prison.
John Galt was a libertarian and he would have considered use of human genomic engineering a matter for parents amd none of the business of reactionary ideologues of left or right.
I’m reminded of insurance. Precisely because individual risk isn’t known but population risk is known enables us to get insurance. If we all know exactly whether or not our house will burn down, only those who know their house is going to burn will insure themselves and consequently insurance couldn’t be offered.
The point is that individual uncertainty underpins collective support. The less our individual perceived uncertainty, the less we are willing to collectively support others. Lung cancer is a classic example. Most now presume because they don’t smoke their risk of lung cancer is low and so relative to the number of cases lung cancer research is dramatically under funded. In effect, lung cancer is bracketed with a behaviour associated with a lower class and doesn’t fit with more aspirational people’s assessment of their own risk.
I can’t help but think the less uncertainty we have about our children’s individual genetic (dis)abilities, the less collective support we’ll provide those with real or perceived genetic disabilities. We truly are opening Pandora’s box.
Theranos redux.
Except that unlike Theranos, this might actually work.
“Your daddy’s rich, and your momma’s good looking
So hush little baby and don’t you cry”
I love that song lyrics it’s so for all time ever true.
We are getting further away from our humanity with every passing year.
“There isn’t a one-to-one relationship between genetic code and genetic expression, meaning we’re not “programmed” by our DNA, as some popular accounts suggest. Instead, DNA reflects a range of possibilities that may or may not be expressed, depending on complex contextual factors”
To nuance that a bit, the epigenetic type effects that emerge out of our DNA are still very much “programming”, it’s just different bits of programming that activate from a “big box” full of nascent effects. The human genome is very old, and has the buildup of detritus of the aeons, there is all sorts of crud there that is not human from the ages – mirrored in the single lifetime of individual humans who are eventually full of stuff, biomass, that is not human. The “big box” is not at all identical in everyone. Epigenetic effects activate based on factors like diet, exposures to toxins over time, bacteria and viruses, or even everyday substances etc, and you get different effects across different groups. There are, for example, tribes who are impervious to pretty much most things that would induce bad health in most people, smoking for example. You cannot, out of box, get effects, “expression”, that are beyond the totality of the possibilities that are already present for that person. The range of possibilities looks like a statistical effect, but it’s not truly random in the quantum sense. DNA playout is deterministic – if you knew all the contextual factors up front, you could compute the playout for the DNA of an individual (assuming you had enough processing power to cope with real world complexity), and it would be identical every time.
The biotechnologies which would allow true change to individual genetics are already present (although as yet still immature of course), like Crispr and mRNA. Once these get going in full swing, I firmly believe humans will be able to change themselves in any way they choose to (that is allowed within the laws of physics of course, you can’t become a marvel superhero or anything like that), although they would not be human anymore in any sense we currently understand. Why anyone would choose to alter themselves also raises an interesting question. The very human ambivalence to the possibilities opening up is just that – very human, burdened by our genetic inheritance.
They’ll probably need GMO labeling.
Agreed. A hologrammic ‘E’ (for enhanced) embedded on the forehead, emitting a deep blue laser light, I reckon. That should do it for the labelling.
Meanwhile, a song to enjoy, as etiquette demands a random response to a random response.
https://youtu.be/9xTR3jgpoNo?si=FkAqXbf_SaE6sK8e
Flickering I roam.
I loath this world we are building
I’m not going to buy into the philosophical arguments too deeply, but I for my part am going to laugh heartily if a good proportion of these so called “superbabies” turn into to slacker stoner types.
I’m going to laugh if they end up in genetic clusters, like are turning up in 23andme and ancestry.com. People paid money to be super-selective in their donor sperm only to find later much of it was coming from one doctor or tech in the selection enterprise. There are a whole series of lawsuits developing and being litigated lately.
These are useful technologies as they could lead to the eradication of a lot if mental illness and personality disorder which leads to crime, poverty and general social strife. The state should therefore allow it an make it conditional on any funding of reproduction. However a better technology will be somatic gene editing which will replace faulty genes with copies that don’t correlate to adverse health and social outcomes. This will satisfy anti abo types, although they and the left will probably try to stop this too.
All the state can do is make it unavailable to common people. Anyone with money will be able to vacation in states without such restrictions.
The Left is just as dense as the Right. Don’t they get it? Under socialism or communism’s heavy hand, one cannot compensate for a lack of desirable genetic attributes through hard work or material gain. Therefore, largely immutable genetic advantages become even more pronounced. You would think that if the “equity” people were rational, they would encourage such genetic correctives, as long as they are made available liberally…
Also, what happened to women being able to make private decisions about their reproductive lives? I thought that was a pillar of the Left. The Left is a joke (so is the Right).