thing a lot of people worry about,” said Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University. “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.”
Yet in Silicon Valley, where top preschools require IQ tests and openness to novelty runs high, parents aren’t burdened by moral quandaries of using technology to select for their children’s intelligence before birth.
“There is a whole ecosystem now of usually super high net-worth people, or rationalist people who are obsessed with intelligence like in Berkeley, who really want to know the IQ scores so they can use that as one of the criteria for selecting their embryo,” said Stephen Hsu, co-founder of Genomic Prediction, among the earliest companies to offer genetic testing of embryos.
Startups Nucleus Genomics and Herasight have begun publicly offering IQ predictions, based on genetic tests, to help people select which embryos to use for in vitro fer-tilization. Bay Area demand is high for the services, costing around $6,000 at Nucleus and up to $50,000 at Herasight.
“Silicon Valley, they love IQ,” said Kian Sadeghi, founder of Nucleus Genomics. That’s not necessarily what parents elsewhere value most. “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.”
Among those who’ve turned to such testing are Simone and Malcolm Collins, leaders in the budding pronatalist movement, which encourages lots of babies. The couple, who worked in tech and venture capital, have four children through IVF, and used Herasight to analyze some of their embryos.
Simone Collins said they chose the embryo she is now pregnant with because it had a low reported risk for cancer. But they were also happy because he was in “the 99th percentile per his polygenic score in likelihood of having really exceptionally high intelligence.”
Collins said higher intelligence is associated with many good things, such as higher income, but she really wishes there were genetic tests that could screen for ambition.
“‘I will’ matters a hell of a lot more than ‘I can,’” she said.
Few couples would endure the difficult and expensive process of IVF unless necessary. But one Bay Area couple, both software engineers, willingly chose it.
The couple worried about diseases in their families such as Alzheimer’s and cancer. They also cared about IQ forecasts because they hoped their kids might be able to solve the world’s important problems and enjoy the life of the mind.
They described themselves as “fairly typical for computer people” who like science fiction, logic puzzles and friendly arguments.
When the results arrived from Herasight, they made a shared Google spreadsheet and both ranked 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?” After vigorous discussion and some complex calculations, they came up with scores for each embryo.
The embryo with the highest total score, which also had the third-highest predicted IQ, became their daughter.
How good is anyone at predicting IQ with genetic tests?
The answer is “not very good,” said Shai Carmi, an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who pioneered the models used for such predictions.
Carmi said researchers have found some correlation between cognitive ability and the cumulative effect of thousands of variants in the hu--man genome. Current models explain about 5% to 10% of the differences in cognitive ability between people, he said.
If parents rank their embryos by the predicted IQ, they could gain between three and four points on average compared with choosing randomly, he said. “It’s not going to be something to make your child a prodigy.”
Experts also caution about unintended consequences. Traits some might not want for their children could come along with selecting 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 Gusev, the Harvard statistical geneticist.
Scholars note there are more traditional, millenia-old ways to aim for a brighter kid, such as education or reproducing with another smart person. “That’s probably more fun,” said Paula Amato, a fertility doctor at Oregon Health & Science University.
The most unusual motive for making smarter babies is emerging from a brainy group of computer scientists in Berkeley. Known as the rationalists, they fear AI poses an existential risk to humanity.
“They think one of the ways that possibly we could make safe AI is if we had smarter humans building them,” said Hsu, the Genomic Prediction co-founder.
