It is the expectation of so many who are about to be parents: May your daughter or son be the healthiest, the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most successful. Understandable, of course. But everything has a limit. And where is that border? If in techniques such as in vitro fertilization one even thinks about subjecting the embryos to genetic screening To select the potentially most intelligent, the boundary between common sense and a disturbing form of eugenics has probably already been assessed. This is not a science fiction scenario or the plot of a dystopian series: as stated Guardianthere is a startup United States, Heliospect Genomicswhich has recently begun offering a service of this type to couples undergoing in vitro fertilization. A series of videos has reached the newspaper’s hands showing that the startup offers the service of genetic screening from IQ to a price of about $50,000 for every hundred embryosensuring that an increase of about six points in IQ can be obtained, and that the technique has already been used in several couples.
The hypothesis that emerges from the information currently available is not only questionable from an ethical point of view, but also scientifically, since the relationship between IQ (which is itself a debated issue: several studies have questioned the real correlation between IQ and “intelligence” in the broad sense) and genetics is not at all clear: genes undoubtedly play a role, but it must be considered within a much more complex panorama in which they also come into play environmental and social factors.
Incognito
But let’s go in order. It all started with an investigation carried out by the activist group Hope Not Hate that infiltrated a startup call PolyGenXsecretly recording footage of meetings with employees. In the videos, one of them is heard explaining that up to one hundred embryos can be chosen based on “IQ and other desired traits,” such as sex, height, risk of obesity, and risk of mental illness. The company claims to have developed predictive tools from extracted data from the UK Biobanka repository that collects data from more than half a million British volunteers and makes it available “for public interest projects only.” What role does Heliospect play? Here things get even more nebulous, and a certain Michael ChristensenDanish manager with commercial training and founder of PolyGenX: “According to company documents,” Hope Not Hate explains, “PolyGenX Research, now known as Genotribe, is based in Sheridan, Wyoming. One of its managers says that the company is currently inactive [dormida]. Another company working in the field of genetics is registered at the same address: it is called Heliospect Genomics and has little visibility online, except for a website that describes it as ‘a startup who works in the field of biotechnology for genomic prediction’ […] From what we have pieced together, Heliospect Genomics is the startup which is behind PolyGenX. We know that Christensen is CEO and founder of both. A scientific research site identifies him as a contact person for Heliospect, and an email from his representative makes it clear that he is the creator of both companies. As we understand it, PolyGenX is a product and Heliospect is a subsidiary company.” The clues linking PolyGenX and Heliospect do not end there: “The UK Biobank publishes a report on each project it approves. PolygenX does not appear in any reports, but on June 9, 2023 a man named Alexandros Giannelis was identified as a principal investigator on a project on behalf of Heliospect Genomics and requested information to test ‘advanced techniques on new genetic data.'”
consulted by GuardianHeliospect executives stated that the company (based in the United States, where legislation on the matter is more lax than in Europe) operates in compliance with all current laws and regulations, and that the service is still in the development phase. and therefore has not yet been announced to the public. Some clues had already been given about the intentions from Heliospect: In 2023, Christensen spoke of the bright future of genetic selection, which would allow everyone to “have as many children as they want, basically disease-free, intelligent and healthy: It’s going to be fantastic”, foreseeing the possibility of cultivating eggs in the laboratory and create embryos on an industrial scale, up to a million, from which an “elite group” could be selected. Contacted after the investigation, Heliospect later recanted, stating that it would under no circumstances engage in the production of eggs or embryos on an industrial scale, much less “elite selection” based on IQ or other traits. However, the acquired videos seem to contradict these claims.
Where does intelligence come from?
As we said, the question is scientific even before it is ethical. Understanding where intelligence comes from and what exactly it is is a very old dilemma that remains difficult to answer. What is known with reasonable certainty is that It is not just genes or just the environment that determine intelligencebut rather their complex interaction: under the same (optimal) economic and educational conditions, differences in intelligence also depend largely on DNA, but in poor and difficult environments even the best genome finds it difficult to emerge. A study published in 2015 analyzed the genome of almost 1,500 people with an exceptional IQ greater than 170 (that is, greater than 99.97% of the population; Nobel Prize winners have an average of 145, and the general population of 100), comparing it with that of about 3,000 average people and focusing in particular on so-called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), that is, variants of a single letter of DNA within a gene. It was concluded that there is not a “gene of the genius“, but what makes the difference is probably the sum of good versions of several genes: generally, very intelligent people do not have a few exceptional genes, but have been lucky enough to inherit a large number of good variants, although quite common, of all the genes involved. Since then, other studies have. corroborated this result, also confirming that the effect of the environment counts (at least) as much as that of genetics. Precisely because of this complexity, according to our current knowledge, The idea of genetically intervening to select people with above-average intelligence is far beyond the real possibilities of science and technology.. “I don’t believe Heliospect’s claims,” he commented, again to Guardian Hannk Greely, a professor at Stanford University, “demonstrate the ability to make genetic predictions about the future intelligence of embryos with enough foresight to produce more than just ridiculous increases. “My first reaction is that this is simply not true.”
Super… chickens?
By the way, you have to be very careful when you reach into the genome. Supporters of embryo selection often cite the success of certain animal breeding programs as evidence of the benefits of genetic selection, forgetting, however, that these programs have sometimes had dramatic results: This was the case, for example, with the breeding of “super chickens” obtained a decade ago by selecting successive generations of particularly prolific chickens in an attempt to increase the performance of the animals. The attempt ended in a bloodbath: The super chickens also turned out to be super aggressive, turning on each other. Predicting what can happen to humans is impossible: it is better to be very cautious.
Article originally published in WIRED Italy. Adapted by Mauricio Serfatty Godoy.
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