Parents Are Paying $50,000 to Pick Their Babies’ Eye Color and IQ. Some Experts Say This Is ‘Very Troubling.’

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This is not science fiction. New technology allows parents to screen embryos for traits like high IQ, height and eye color to create “genetically-enhanced” humans—and companies are charging up to $50,000 for the service.

Biotech startups like Herasight in North Carolina, Nucleus Genomics in New York and Orchid Health in California use polygenic risk scores to predict which embryos are most likely to produce tall, smart, healthy children. The technology analyzes genetic variants to estimate everything from Alzheimer’s risk to propensity for baldness. “We help people have their best babies,” Kian Sadeghi, founder of Nucleus Genomics told NPR, calling it “genetic optimization.” So far, the companies say they’ve screened thousands of embryos for hundreds of prospective parents and already helped create dozens, possibly hundreds, of genetically-screened babies.

But medical experts are pushing back hard. “I’m very worried about the kind of dystopian world that this way of using technologies could lead to,” says Katie Hasson, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society. “It’s very troubling.” The American College of Medical Genetics says the science isn’t ready, and bioethicists worry about creating a society of superhumans.