Most people are familiar with eugenics as a disturbing and morally repugnant artifact from the past, something we associate with Nazi experiments and racial pseudo-science. But it’s making a comeback in our time thanks to new branding and new technology. Call it neo-eugenics, coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
The old eugenics was of course the study and practice of shaping a population through selective breeding based on heritable traits deemed desirable, and the sterilization or prohibition on reproduction for those deemed undesirable. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, eugenics produced a nasty set of policies, both in the United States and Europe. These policies were eventually discredited and discarded in part because Nazi Germany was big on eugenics. It was official Nazi policy, for example, to identify various groups of German citizens deemed “unfit” and then systematically kill them with poison gas — a practice that turned out to be a precursor to the Holocaust.
But now eugenics is making a comeback thanks to Peter Thiel-inspired libertarian tech-bros who have, no kidding, rebranded it “preventative medicine.” This week, a company called Nucleus Genomics, a genetics testing startup founded by a 25-year-old named Kian Sadeghi, unveiled a new product called Nucleus Embryo that allows parents to screen embryos created through IVF by projected IQ, height, eye color, and hundreds of other traits before deciding which to implant and which to discard.
The company is marketing this new product, which costs $5,999, as “preventative medicine,” a hi-tech health tool that delivers what the company calls “polygenic risk scores,” meant to predict the likelihood of things like Alzheimer’s, heart disease and various cancers — among many other things, including IQ, height, and hundreds of other traits.
But calling it “preventative medicine” is just a bit of lazy legerdemain. It doesn’t change the fact that Nucleus Embryo is nothing more than a hi-tech form of eugenics — screening the unborn for “desirable” traits like IQ and snuffing out those deemed undesirable or unfit. Much like the Nazis would have done if they’d had such technology. As Michael Knowles noted on X, “To be clear, this technology does not help you extend your baby’s life; it provides information — and dubious information, at that — to help you kill your weakest children.”
When Sadeghi was called out on social media about the obvious fact that he’s hawking a eugenics product, he doubled down, insisting that what he euphemistically calls “genetic optimization” somehow isn’t eugenics. “Everyone talks about optimizing health,” wrote Sadeghi. “When someone says that, they don’t just mean the absence of disease. They mean thriving, in every sense: cognitively, physically, etc.”
By slipping in “cognitively,” and touting the IQ component to his genetic screening product, Sadeghi has collapsed two very different things while pretending that he’s just giving parents tools to screen for disease. He’s not, he’s enabling a form of neo-eugenics targeted at children in utero.
In a response to my colleague Mark Hemingway, Sadeghi expressed shock that anyone would think his company is offering a eugenics service. “Since when is preventative medicine eugenics? And if a couple exercises their right to choose their own embryo based on what matter [sic] most to them… that’s eugenics?”
Yes, that’s eugenics. And all it takes to grasp that simple fact is a crude moral compass and an ability to reason that’s slightly more developed that a kindergartener’s.
To help tech-bros like Sadeghi understand why this is eugenics, let’s do a little thought experiment that plays into liberal pieties. Using Sadeghi’s own framing, let’s say a couple chooses their embryo based on what matters most to them. And let’s say that what matters most to them is skin tone and eye color — light skin and blue, to be specific. And let’s say, too, that a couple wants to screen for the likelihood that their baby will grow up to be gay, trans, or not-white-enough, and then eliminate all those “unfit” embryos? What if they simply want to rid their family tree of what they consider to be low-IQ gays and Untermensch filth? Isn’t that their right, as parents? To “choose their own embryo,” as Sadeghi put it?
This is of course exactly what Sadeghi and Nucleus Genomics are offering, and the only accurate thing to call it is eugenics.
I don’t mean to single out this one company and its morally bankrupt tech-bro founder. This sort of thing is becoming the norm in a Silicon Valley increasingly populated by techies who either haven’t spent five seconds thinking about the moral and ethical implications of the technologies they’re working on, or are cynically pretending not to understand the valid moral objections to those technologies.
Take for example Noor Siddiqui, founder of a genetic screening company called Orchid that was the subject of a New York Times piece back in April. In the article we learn that when Siddiqui was a child her mother developed a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, which gradually leads to partial or complete blindness. Watching her mother go through that, Siddiqui says, “burned a hole in my heart for a while,” and eventually led her to found Orchid, which not only screens embryos’ DNA for hundreds of conditions like retinitis pigmentosa, but also offers a similar type of polygenic screening that Nucleus Genomics offers, giving parents a risk profile for various conditions and diseases — along with a bunch of other stuff.
What is less often emphasized, because of its obvious association with Nazi-style eugenics, is all that other stuff: traits like IQ, height, hair color, and so on. So when Siddiqui posts a video on X saying, “Sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies,” and, “It’s going to become insane not to screen for these things,” it’s doesn’t take much to see how these technologies could usher in a neo-eugenic regime — at least for those who can afford it. It also doesn’t take much to see how morally fraught such a regime would be.
At least, it shouldn’t take much. But people like Sadeghi and Siddiqui seem to have a hard time grasping the moral dilemma they’re creating. In an April interview with Jason Kehe of Wired, Siddiqui is asked the most painfully obvious question imaginable, given her own family history.
If, says Kehe, “Orchid technology had existed back then, and if the batch of embryos that contained your future mom had been screened, and if her parents — your grandparents — had not wanted their child to grow up with retinitis pigmentosa, and if they had therefore picked a different embryo and had a different child, then you — the discarded embryo’s future daughter — would not exist. Right? Do you think about that? Is that a fair line of thinking?”
Siddiqui replies, “I sort of understand it, but I sort of don’t.”
Kehe tries a couple of times to help Siddiqui grasp the obvious point: that her technology, had it been around, might have eliminated people with certain genetic conditions, like her own mother. Is she okay with that? But Siddiqui doesn’t even acknowledge the dilemma. Finally, in an attempt to get her to grapple with the moral implications of all this, Kehe says, “So who’s to say that, by eliminating these conditions, we’re not eliminating the kind of person who would then go on to, for instance, want to make the world better?”
The only response Siddiqui can muster is this: “The entire history of human existence is reducing suffering and making it so that more people get to participate more fully in society. Right?”
Yet Kehe persists. In a last-ditch effort to get through, he says: “But again, you think that’s unfair because of who your mom is. Because she suffers. Something about her suffering catalyzed in you the desire to end suffering in other people. Does that make sense?”
“No,” she says, “that doesn’t make sense.”
This sort of response — that human history is all about “reducing suffering” — comes from a moral conscience totally unacquainted with and unformed by the moral and philosophical teachings of the world’s major religions, and especially the religion that founded western civilization, Christianity. If tech entrepreneurs like Siddiqui had even a passing familiarity with Christian teaching, they would know how morally vacant this worldview is and how mendacious and anti-human their neo-eugenic technologies really are.
Moreover, a rudimentary acquaintance with the Christian scriptures would reveal what most people of the West have believed for thousands of years: that the unborn child is ensouled, unique, precious in the sight of God, and cannot simply be discarded on a whim. “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” says the psalmist. “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb,” exclaims a pregnant Elizabeth to her cousin, the Virgin Mary, upon her visitation. “And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leapt for joy.”
Discarding babies for convenience sake was after all the practice of the pagan Romans, which the early Christians immediately countered by rescuing infants abandoned outside to die from exposure. Now the pagans are back, wielding new and terrible technologies. If people like Sadeghi and Siddiqui have their way, there’s no end to the parade of real-life horrors that they will produce — all in the name of “reducing suffering.” We will see artificial wombs, in vitro gametogenesis, organ harvesting from gene-edited embryos with anencephaly, and things even worse and more demonic that we can’t yet name.
All of this will happen if the neopagan visionaries of Silicon Valley have their way. And many of them will not only think they are doing good, they won’t even understand the objections of those who, in continuity with thousands of years of Christendom, rightly understand that this means the re-introduction of a barbarism that was once banished, and has now returned, worse — much worse — than ever before.