‘Hipster eugenicist’ couple hopes to make real-life ‘Gattaca’ babies through genetic screening

Malcom and Simone Collins said they plan on having between seven and 13 children; currently, they have three born children. They also plan for their children to have at least eight children of their own, so within 11 generations, their bloodline will outnumber the current human population. Dubbing themselves “hipster eugenicists,” their goal is to create a more intelligent world. In an interview with Business Insider, they spoke of their efforts to create, test, and then implant embryos who meet their specifications, and claimed they would create a better version of humanity by doing so.

“[W]e could set the future of our species,” Malcom said. “We are the Underground Railroad of ‘Gattaca’ babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids.”

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The Collinses are working with Genomic Prediction, which offers PGT-P; Business Insider described it as “a controversial new type of genetic testing that allows parents who are undergoing in vitro fertilization to select the ‘best’ available embryos based on a variety of polygenic risk factors.” Each embryo is essentially screened and then given a score; the test, though, does not guarantee the child will have a certain disease or trait. It merely indicates that the child might have a certain condition one day.

In the Collinses case, they want to predict an “Idiocracy”-esque future; in that movie, the population has been severely dumbed down because so-called poorer, less intelligent people outbred the alleged intelligent, wealthy people. The Collinses see themselves as the latter, and feel that their bloodline is superior to others. And they also want to encourage other people like them — Silicon Valley investors with lots of money and high IQs — to follow their lead. Simone said their goal is to have their collective offspring “become the new dominant leading classes in the world.”

Émile P. Torres, a philosopher and critic of the movement the Collinses are trying to launch, did not hold back on her statement to Business Insider. “The longtermist view itself implies that really, people in rich countries matter more,” Torres said.

2018 was, as the Collinses call it, the “Year of the Harvest” — it’s when they began producing and freezing “as many viable embryos as possible.” Then, in addition to the tests Genomic Prediction runs, they did their own analysis, testing for IQ, mood swings, ADHD, and much more; the information was placed in a spreadsheet, and the three most desirable embryos were then chosen. Overall, they plan to give birth to as many as 10 children. The embryos who don’t make the cut are, presumably, destroyed.

“It’s funny that people are so afraid of being accused of Nazism,” Simone said, and told Business Insider that her Jewish grandmother escaped Nazi-occupied France. “I’m not eliminating people. I mean, I’m eliminating from my own genetic pool, but these are all only Malcolm and me.”

Yet the Collinses’ inherent goal is to eliminate human beings, by their own admission, so that intelligent children with specific traits, born to wealthy parents, will outbreed the people they see as “less-than” — people who are deemed less intelligent, or who have risk factors for things like obesity or heart disease, or who have disabilities.

In a perfect world, these kinds of people would not exist, say the Collinses — who are abortion supporters, according to Business Insider. And though Simone evidently does not want to admit it, she and her husband have created — and eliminated — many lives, simply because they deemed those lives unworthy of life.