Fertility startup company in US offers embryo screening for IQ… and even acne

An undercover journalist has found that a US fertility startup company has pushed further into the world of eugenics with its alleged offer to allow wealthy couples to weed out their children based on their projected IQ, sparking more concern about the ethics of IVF and genetic enhancement.

According to The Guardian, the IQ testing controversy was exposed by the group ‘HOPE not hate,’ which sent an undercover reporter to Heliospect Genomics posing as a potential customer seeking IVF with his partner. He was quoted $50,000 to use the screening tool PolygenX, which is marketed as a way to analyze genetic data to find which embryo will have the highest IQ.

The reporter took part in a November 2023 video call, during which Michael Christensen, the company’s Danish CEO, pushed PolygenX as a way to help every parent to “have all the children they want and … have children that are basically disease-free, smart, healthy; it’s going to be great.”

The reporter also participated in several online meetings with Heliospect and was presented with the company’s “polygenic scoring” service. It would take the embryos that a couple creates through IVF at another business and use algorithms to analyze genetic data supplied by the parents to predict the traits of their embryos. It said that selecting the 10 “smartest” embryos would allegedly lead to an IQ gain of about six points. It would also screen the embryos for height, obesity, and even acne.

It scores the embryos in part based on the information gathered through Heliospect’s access to biobanks, including UK Biobank, a taxpayer-funded store of genetic material donated by hundreds of thousands of British citizens who agreed to share their genetic data for life. It includes the health, genomic, and intelligence information of those volunteers, who are mostly white and wealthy individuals. Because of this, notes ‘HOPE not hate,’ the scoring that is built into the system will perform at a lower capacity for potential parents outside of that demographic. Ancestry and environmental factors affect polygenic scores — bringing into question the company’s desire to help all parents.

READ: The ethical dilemma of a ‘perfect’ child, and the eugenic undertones of the IVF industry

In reality, it’s allegedly creating up to 100 embryos for wealthy couples and then testing them for IQ at a hefty price tag. Those embryos who don’t pass the IQ test are likely tossed because, quite frankly, no one is having 100 children.

Couples could create a seemingly limitless number of embryos and then choose the so-called best of the bunch. Though the company denied that it would allow the creation of embryos on an industrial scale, it is staffed by supporters of eugenics like Jonathan Anomaly (born Beres).

Anomaly is known for his eugenic efforts and his connection to Aporai, a scientific racism website. In 2020, Anomaly published his book “Creating Future People,” in which he argued in favor of eugenics and said ‘eugenics’ became a “dirty word” because of the Nazis and the Holocaust. He has defended “liberal eugenics” as a way to allow parents to “be free and maybe even encouraged to use technology to improve their children’s prospects…”

He called the UK Biobank “a godsend,” adding, “That’s basically the best thing that’s ever happened for this field.”

PolygenX is expected to go public in 2025 but Christensen has said “[t]here are babies on the way” already, despite the fact that selecting embryos based on predicted IQ is prohibited in the UK. Yet, it is completely legal in the United States.

Heliospect advises potential parents to meet with an IVF clinic in the U.S., undergo IVF, request the genetic data of the embryos, and send that data to PolygenX in Wyoming. Then they will receive a login to PolygenX’s secret website where their embryos will be ranked by IQ, sex, mental health, and physical health, as well as certain characteristics like ADHD — and potentially even hair color, eye color, and other traits. Once the desired embryos are chosen, the couple would then return to the IVF clinic and state which embryos they want to attempt to implant.

Heliospect refers to itself as “a biotech startup at the forefront of genomic prediction.” Its goal is “to advance the field of genomic prediction in order to improve human health and wellbeing,” and it proclaims to be “pushing the limits of genomic prediction.”

Pushing the limits of genomic prediction means pushing the limits of morality and ethics in terms of which human beings are deemed worthy of life and which are labeled as failures to be thrown away. The IVF process treats reproduction as an assembly line and children as products to be scrutinized for perfection and objects that must meet the desires of their owners. The work of Heliospect further confirms and expands this.

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