In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley painted a dystopian picture of human reproduction that was controlled and influenced from the moment an embryo was manufactured in a lab all the way through its ectogenesis. Unfortunately for us, Huxley’s 1932 musings about how far removed humanity will be from procreation to usher in an era of handpicked breeding have turned out to be more fact than fiction.
The latest example of the slippery slope towards dystopia comes in the form of Nucleus Genomics, yet another whole-genome sequencing company. The founder’s latest project, Nucleus Embryo, is solely dedicated to ensuring his customers feel “empowered” to choose which of their test tube babies get a chance at life via implantation based on the desirability of their alleged appearance such as eye and hair color, health predictors such as BMI and chronic pain, IQ, and predisposition to disease like Alzheimer’s or disorders like schizophrenia.
It is apparently not enough that more and more Americans are undergoing multiple rounds of in vitro fertilization (IVF) that will no doubt result in the loss of countless little lives. Now, the fertility industry and its tech bro partners want those harnessing the power of lab-created life to rank that life based on their desirable traits.
Nucleus visionary and CEO Kian Sadeghi spent most of his Embryo project’s launch day desperately sparring on social media in an attempt to call the stuff he’s selling “preventative medicine.”
“Modern genetics is another tool parents can use — alongside love, opportunity, and care — to give their child the best possible start in life,” he insists.
Medicine is something used to treat or prevent sickness and disease. Nucleus’ “state-of-the-art testing and analysis” purports to identify ailments in embryos before they ever make it to the womb.
The company’s prescription for those little lives that show signs of objectionable traits or illness, however, is not to treat them. It’s a eugenics-fueled campaign, covered up with euphemisms, to make them compete for a chance in the womb.
In true Orwellian fashion, Nucleus’ website simply suggests its clients will “ensure their embryos won’t have any rare, pathogenic markers that we analyze for” — doublespeak for sentencing the allegedly afflicted embryos to fate via cryogenic freezer, discard, or dissection.
Sadeghi even eagerly pitches software that encourages clients to “name your embryos and leave notes on the ones you like.”
‘For Science’
Some would argue that when the first “test tube” baby was successfully born of “groundbreaking” IVF experimentation in 1978, the blatant eugenics touted by Nucleus was not even in the realm of possibility. What’s ensued over the last nearly 50 years, however, is deplorable experimentation on and disregard for human life that is justified to the public and policymakers as a necessary means to a noble end.
Our society and culture’s embrace and even elevation of assisted reproductive technology has wreaked havoc on women’s bodies and minds, deliberately left innocent children without mothers or fathers, made human existence transactional, effectively doomed millions of unborn lives to frozen orphanages, and created a moral and ethical minefield of problems that will haunt generations.
To the touters of ART, IVF is not a last resort to reproduce but the future of procreation, a “new normal.”
Sadeghi truly believes that his eugenics-like analysis on embryos will become “everyday practice.” His optimism mirrors calls from other whole-genome sequencing creators, such as Orchid founder Noor Siddiqui, who asserted not long ago that handpicked breeding is the “future of how all babies will be created.”
What seems to have begun as a few tech bros messing around with CRISPR has turned into an entire movement of mad scientist-like entrepreneurs, boosted with publicity from corporate media, selling their eugenics startups’ pitches to anyone who can afford their steep prices.
But the future is not as bright as they want to make it seem. Procreation without women by reprogramming adult male stem cells to become usable eggs, artificial wombs, “gene editing,” and more eugenics are all on the ART horizon, threatening to replace the sacred act of reproduction with soul-eroding transhumanism.
Even if regulators finally decide to intervene, it will be too late.
The mere existence of Nucleus Embryo and Orchid suggests there is a significant level of public demand and private funding for projects rooted in the belief that human life is only valuable if it will look, act, or be a certain way.
A society that has proven time and time again that it is willing to sacrifice life in its smallest, most vulnerable form in the name of science and technological advancement needs more than a few laws to be fixed. It needs an ideological and moral revolution that does not excuse the handpicked mass murder of human life as breakthrough and freedom.