By Chuck Donovan

Millions of people turn to The Wall Street Journal for insights on the stock market. As of today, the Journal has become a source for insight on the breeding stock market — in humans. In an article titled “Inside Silicon Valley’s Growing Obsession with Having Smarter Babies,” the Journal’s reporter Zusha Elinson (IQ unknown, but he says he grew up on a dirt road and has worked as a stonemason and chimney sweep) describes the extraordinary lengths some Berkeley-based pioneers are going to in order to produce designer babies who will live better lives and solve human problems. The article reads like science fiction, but the labs and the money involved are all too real and contemporary.

Eugenics, of course, has a well-earned bad name. It reached its first zenith in the Third Reich, but its origins date decades earlier with the arrival of inheritance studies and the findings of Darwinism, particularly the work of Sir Francis Galton, a gifted polymath whose contributions to measuring and understanding science were varied and substantial. The best account of the history of eugenics, in both its positive and negative forms, is that of Edwin Black, published in 2004. “War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race” is meticulously detailed and lays out the many ways in which scholars and social leaders in the West, including Europe, drove the Nazi campaign to weed out people the government was convinced were a drag on human accomplishment.

The new American voices for eugenics are politic enough that they do not openly speak of destroying embryos that are not up to snuff, whether that be compromised physical health, predictions of future diseases, or inferences of lower IQ. They do rely on techniques like IVF and embryo genetic testing that rely on identifying the “best” embryos and selecting them for implantation and gestation. The rest are presumably set aside, forgotten, discarded, or donated for research. What is most enlightening in Elinson’s article is how robust and advanced the “Silicon Values” genomics industry already is.

Elinson depicts one particular couple, whom he describes as principals in “the budding pronatalist movement,” who have brought four children to birth and are expecting a fifth. They are a remarkably cheerful-looking pair, with, as it turns out, an already sizable media presence. Malcolm and Simone Collins’s chosen method to date has involved the use of IVF via a company named Herasight, which conducts IQ predictive testing on embryos and charges up to $50,000 per child for its services. The fifth baby, known to be a boy, has been named Tex Demeisen, the middle name emanating from a science fiction novel titled “Surface Detail,” “after the avatar of a warship known as Falling Outside the Normal Moral Restraints.” The article makes plain how painstakingly couples deploy their Herasight numbers, admittedly an infant science, to forecast the future lives of their offspring. One couple, Bay Area software engineers, developed a spreadsheet and calculated a genetic score for their child, tracking small percentage increases and decreases in health risks, projected IQ, and more. The article does not say how many embryos were created and assessed in the process, nor what happened to the ones whose overall numbers were lower.

Elinson quotes many prominent critics of this positive eugenic enterprise, some who do so on scientific grounds and others who question its fundamental ethics. Most alarming is the number of organizations he cites and the soaring prices they command for what is certainly speculative forecasting. Besides Herasight, there is the nonprofit Berkeley Genomics Project (BGP), which leads on its website with the proud proclamation of its intent to pursue germline (heritable) genetic engineering. Germline alteration is universally banned because of its manifestly eternal and indeterminable effects on future generations. This summer the BGP sponsored an event on the reproductive future for which it proclaimed, “In the next decade, we expect to see the creation of technology that will empower all parents to have children who are related to them genetically, and who enjoy a solid genomic foundation to become healthy, long-lived, happy, and capable humans.” The reference to “all parents” accords with the goal of some genomics advocates to eliminate the conjugal, male-female paradigm from the begetting and bearing of children.

Then there is Stephen Hsu, CEO of a firm called Genomic Prediction, who says of the quest of some parents for the engineering of smarter babies, “There is a whole ecosystem now of usually super high net-worth people, or rationalist people who are obsessed with intelligence like in Berkeley, who really want to know the IQ scores so they can use that as one of the criteria for selecting their embryo.” GP powers a website called LifeView that offers information about providers nationwide and something called the LifeView Embryo Health Score Test (EHS). The test “is designed to reduce the risk of disease. It estimates the chance in each embryo to develop common conditions such as diabetes, certain cancers, schizophrenia, and heart disease. This important health information helps you and your clinician make an informed decision about which embryo to choose for transfer.” Nucleus Genomics, another IQ testing outfit, is described as well. “Silicon Valley, they love IQ,” says the firm’s founder.

What to make of these developments in a field of vast significance for the human future? Silicon Valley is not the only source of fascination with more but better babies, but it represents the cutting edge. Elon Musk has drawn attention repeatedly to the “birth dearth” from his high-tech perspective. He has begotten children with at least four women and has purchased a compound with three mansions in Texas to house them and some of the 14 or more children he has sired. IVF has figured in the conception and selection of some of them. He expresses a desire to spend more time with them and their mothers.

Musk’s tangled and enormously expensive parenting style and the cost of genetic screenings generally may offer some cold comfort. Are these practices mere California constructs, progressive, fantastically costly, and therefore self-limiting? Would most people even entertain such a course of finely tailored sons and daughters, as depicted in the film “Gattaca,” when the cost is so high of generating them, educating them to the level of expectation established in the lab, and elevating them in a society newly engineered to admire certain standards of perfection?

Considered in such a light, it is especially gratifying that, to date, the Trump administration has declined to pursue a national taxpayer funding mandate for practices that have already resulted in the freezing of millions of embryonic humans. The suspension and likely deaths of most of those embryos are a grievous part of a campaign that has the potential to remake the entirety of the human condition. That so much of Silicon Valley presumes this prediction and selection process will undoubtedly be to the betterment of society is itself a warning.

The greatest power parents possess is to love their child unconditionally. To love them when they become an astronaut as planned or a bus driver because that is what life afforded them. To cherish them whether their SATs were through the roof or they had an extra chromosome. To help them develop their God-given talents while remembering, always remembering, that every moment with them, on Earth or among the stars, was and is precious and itself God-given. Such love is a proper thing on which to obsess for all our babies.

Chuck Donovan served in the Reagan White House as a senior writer and as Deputy Director of Presidential Correspondence until early 1989. He was executive vice president of Family Research Council, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and founder/president of Charlotte Lozier Institute from 2011 to 2024. He has written and spoken extensively on issues in life and family policy.