Jun 10, 1:10 PM EDT/ by Noor Al-Sibai
Genetics Startup Advertises App-Based Eugenics Service for Parents to Select “Smartest” Embryos
“I was going to type something like Noah get the boat but honestly the reality of this just makes me so nauseous.”
A Gen Z entrepreneur and apparent eugenics enthusiast has launched an app that allows prospective parents to rank which embryos they want the most.
First reported by the Wall Street Journal, this new, subscription-based platform hails from Nucleus Genomics, a startup founded by 25-year-old Kian Sadeghi who likens potential backlash against his “genetic optimization” service to the fears surrounding in-vitro fertilization (IVF) just a few decades ago.
“Not that long ago, IVF once sparked fear and the stigma of ‘test-tube babies,'” Sadeghi said in a moving video ad for Nucleus Embryo, the new service. “Today, it’s how one in 50 people in the US are conceived.”
It’s a compelling point, to be sure — though still a hotly-debated topic ethically.
Descriptions of the startup’s new service, which is currently co-offered by the biotech company Genomic Prediction, do little to dispel any sense of knee-jerk disgust.
Along with its standard $500 saliva send-in test box that tests for hundreds of heritable diseases — a process akin to DNA box tests from Ancestry.com and the now-bankrupt 23AndMe — the Peter Thiel-backed company maintains that for $6,000, parents can select their favorites from up to 20 embryos based on everything from how smart the future child may be to how they might look.
Unsurprisingly, that alleged phenotypic selection has drawn harsh criticism.
“I was going to type something like Noah get the boat,” venture capitalist Max Niederhofer tweeted alongside a screenshot of the Nucleus embryo selection dashboard, “but honestly the reality of this just makes me so nauseous.”
In that same thread, another startup founder remarked that Nucleus sounded like “so much snake oil,” to which Niederhofer responded that “not unlike snake oil, it kills.”
This isn’t the first time Sadeghi — who has also advertised his own singlehood when announcing his company’s new genetic-matching dating app — has been roundly denounced for attempting to sell eugenicist fantasies.
As TechCrunch notes, the startup was accused last year of peddling “bad science as big business” by genetic data scholar Ben Williamson when it launched Nucleus IQ, a service that could allegedly tell parents how their genes would affect their future children’s intelligence.
Though Sadeghi insisted that such intelligence predictions were “not snake oil [but] a starting point,” experts called bull — and as genetic statistician Sasha Gustev noted, the youthful startup founder hasn’t done much to explain whether the product actually works.
In Nucleus’ new video and in a press release on the Nucleus website, Sadeghi claimed that his is the first company “in human history” to ever “openly” work with parents to “optimize their embryos based on intelligence.”
More on consumer genetics: Bankrupt 23andMe Just Sold Off All Your DNA Data
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