The 21st century has seen startups rise from a relatively niche business approach to a multi-trillion-dollar phenomenon. Between 2021 and 2023, startups generated an estimated $7.6 trillion in global value. From 2019 to 2023 — a rocky period for the economy overall — the number of startups in the US still increased by 16 percent.
But with all that success comes a whole lotta risk. It's estimated that over two-thirds of startups fail to deliver a positive return to investors. Many fail before they deliver any returns whatsoever.
That failure rate encourages would-be entrepreneurs to throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks. Over the past few months, we've been graced with such inspiring ventures as a Rent-A-Thug app, a for-profit alarm clock, and even an AI-powered camera that analyzes turds.
Adding to the mix is a shiny new "genetics" startup that would make Charles Davenport blush: Herasight.
Herasight was unveiled by geneticists Tobias Wolfram and Alex Strudwick Young, who recently announced the company was coming out of "stealth mode," a period of secret development startups can use to protect intellectual property. In the announcement, Young billed the company as an "in-vitro fertilization (IVF) startup," claiming it could predict the likelihood of 17 various diseases developing in a given set of embryos.
In a post on X-formerly-Twitter, Young claimed that Herasight had already screened "hundreds of embryos." His announcement was accompanied by a screenshot of an interactive widget developed by the company — which included another striking measurement: an intelligence range for predicting a baby's IQ score.
To use the widget to predict IQ, users first pick "intelligence" from a list of traits and diseases including schizophrenia, melanoma, and gout. Then, users select the mother and father's racial ancestry, as well as the mean family IQ. From there, one simply inputs the "embryo count" — anywhere from 3 to 20 — and let the algorithm work its magic.
Though screening embryos for traits like IQ is technically legal in the US, the practice is forbidden in other countries such as the UK, and many scientists point to a lack of evidence that embryonic screening can actually predict traits like height or intelligence.
Still, when has some murky science ever slowed down a startup?
"Today we come out of stealth with a paper showing that our predictors for 17 diseases — validated within-family — beat the competition, with improved performance in non-Europeans," Young beamed on X.
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