Wealthy Parents use Embryo Screening to Select “Intelligent” Children and Kill the Rest

A growing number of families in Silicon Valley are embracing genetic testing and selective matchmaking in the hope of producing children with higher intelligence, Wall Street Journal reporter Zusha Elinson wrote in an Aug. 12 article.

Elinson described a surge of interest in embryo screening services that promise to rank future children by traits such as intelligence. Because such testing can only be done on embryos created through in vitro fertilization (IVF), some couples in the area are pursuing IVF specifically for the opportunity to screen and compare embryos.

The offerings, which can cost as much as $50,000, have drawn a particularly eager audience in the Bay Area.

“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,” Stephen Hsu, co-founder of Genomic Prediction, an early entrant in embryo genetic testing, told Elinson.

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For some parents, the calculation has moved beyond health into cold arithmetic. Elinson described couples creating spreadsheets to weigh traits, with one Bay Area pair debating whether “10 extra IQ points” were worth an added risk of attention deficit disorder.

Even the dating scene has been reshaped by these ambitions. Matchmaker Jennifer Donnelly told Elinson that her tech clients openly prioritize intelligence in partners, not only for romance but for the perceived genetic payoff.

“Intelligence and high IQ is discussed all the time,” she said. “They want to raise high-performing children. They aren’t just thinking about love, they’re thinking about genetics, the educational outcomes and the legacy.”

Elinson noted that companies such as Nucleus Genomics and Herasight now openly advertise embryo ranking based on statistical models of genetic variants. But the science offers only marginal differences.

“If parents rank their embryos by the predicted IQ, they could gain between three and four points on average compared with choosing randomly,” said Shai Carmi, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who helped develop such models. “It’s not going to be something to make your child a prodigy.”

Experts warn that this pursuit may deepen inequality and carry unintended consequences. Harvard geneticist Sasha Gusev said many in Silicon Valley see their own success as rooted in “good genes” and now hope to replicate that in their children.

Stanford bioethicist Hank Greely was more blunt, telling Elinson it resembled “a great science fiction plot: The rich people create a genetically super caste that takes over and the rest of us are proles.”

Scientists also caution that selecting for higher intelligence could inadvertently increase risks for disorders like autism. Still, enthusiasm for “genetic optimization” continues to spread among a tech culture accustomed to shaping the future with algorithms and code.

LifeNews Note: Rachel Quackenbush writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.

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