How selecting for Harvard in utero could go sideways
As long as our culture equates wealth and success with human value, this practice is inevitable. But it could easily go wrong.
The brave new world is coming, and we're already on its doorstep:
The footage appears to show experimental genetic selection techniques being advertised to prospective parents. A Heliospect employee, who has been helping the company recruit clients, outlined how couples could rank up to 100 embryos based on "IQ and the other naughty traits that everybody wants", including sex, height, risk of obesity and risk of mental illness.
An American startup, Heliospect Genomics, charges prospective parents as much as $50,000 to screen embryos for desirable genetic traits, especially intelligence. According to undercover footage, they claim they can help parents select the embryos genetically predestined to be the smartest. And if Heliospect's founders are to be believed, the first children selected through their screening process have already been born or will soon be.
Naturally, this is an opportunity available only to the wealthy. Heliospect only does the genetic screening; it doesn't help create the embryos. Those have to be obtained through IVF, which costs tens of thousands to start with, on top of whatever Heliospect charges.
We don't need to imagine the dystopias that might spring from this. Hollywood has already depicted sci-fi worlds with a genetic caste system, where the elite modify their offspring to be superior while the rest of us are an oppressed underclass. We're barreling toward that future in reality, which is a terrifying prospect.
However, before we start to panic, there are a few questions we ought to ask. The first one is: Is boosting intelligence even possible?
Intelligence is notoriously elusive and hard to define. It's almost certainly multidimensional, not a single, general-purpose "good at everything" trait. Nor is it necessarily determinative of wealth, success or happiness.
Despite valid concerns about cultural bias in IQ tests, there's reason to believe that the tests measure something real. For example, one major line of evidence for the neurotoxic effects of lead is lower IQ scores in people who were exposed to it as children. It's also not in dispute that intelligence is heritable, as twin studies have repeatedly found a strong genetic component.
What is in dispute—very much so—is which genes contribute to it and how much. Intelligence can't be adjusted by turning a single genetic knob. It's a polygenic trait that emerges from interactions among dozens or hundreds of genes. There are studies that have identified candidate genes for intelligence, but these are mere statistical associations. We don't yet understand the physical basis of intelligence in the brain, let alone how these genes might contribute to it.
There's plenty of room for skepticism about whether Heliospect can deliver what they promise. While there must be some genes that influence intelligence, it's likely that others are spurious correlations—mere genetic noise in a statistical dragnet—and it's questionable whether we know which are which. At this point in time, trying to predict a child's traits based on their genes may be no more reliable than tarot cards or horoscopes.
As a more unsettling possibility, there's a chance that selecting genes for one trait, like intelligence, will inadvertently boost other, less desirable traits. There are examples of this in animals:
In one case, in the 2010s, scientists bred so-called "superchickens", after selecting successive generations of prolific egg layers in an effort to boost livestock productivity. But the superchickens also turned out to be incredibly aggressive. When introduced into a farmyard environment the flock descended into disarray, with some of the hens pecking each other to death. There is no guarantee that selecting for high IQ in humans would not also produce unanticipated outcomes.
Prospective parents contemplating genetic screening for their children should ask themselves: What if the same thing happens to them? What if, in attempting to select for intelligence, we bring along genes for bipolar disorder, or depression, or schizophrenia—or something worse? What if we create Khan Noonien Singh?
For now, we still have time. We can't create genetically customized children to order... yet. But our collective knowledge is only going to improve. Even if there are false promises or missteps along the way, it's likely that we'll be able to do it eventually.
The problem is that, in the absence of a global lawmaking body, any attempt to outlaw this technology is doomed to fail. If one country bans it, companies will just move somewhere that's more permissive. As long as there's demand—and there will be demand—the rich and powerful will seek out their services.
It's inevitable that people are going to use genetic screening, if not outright genetic modification, to create children with traits they deem desirable. Deterrence after the fact is also tricky, since it would be immoral to punish people for something their parents did that they had no control over. The only feasible solution is to look at the root cause: the reason why people feel a need to do this at all.
The answer to that question centers around the massive inequality that we allow to exist, and the status anxiety it creates. It's the fear of falling behind in a sink-or-swim world that drives parents. Understandably, many of them want their kids to have every possible advantage, even if it's illegal, immoral or dangerous.
As long as our culture equates wealth and success with value as a human, this and other, worse practices will flourish. In a world where everyone is respected and valued, and no one's access to the stuff of life was dependent on money, we might learn to be better at accepting ourselves and others as we are.
