A few days ago, on December 3, CBS ran this headline: "CEO of company screening embryo DNA defends 'genetic optimization' for babies."
CBS continued, "Kian Sadeghi, the founder and CEO of Nucleus Genomics, believes every parent has a right to select the qualities they most desire in their potential future children, calling it 'genetic optimization'. The 25-year-old says DNA screening of embryos can prevent disease, and defended practices amid ethical concerns over screening for traits like height and intelligence."
Who is in charge? God or man?
Be informed, not misled.
CBS News: "Nucleus Genomics CEO explains how 'genetic optimization' tools help parents select traits they desire in babies."
CBS says: "Big leaps in science have made a once-impossible, much-debated question come to life: Would you design your unborn child?"
Kian Sadeghi, the 25-year-old founder and CEO at Nucleus Genomics, believes every parent has a right to do just that, selecting qualities they desire – from height to weight to intelligence. He calls it "genetic optimization," and it's part of a Silicon Valley push to breed "super-babies."
Sadeghi dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania and started the company in 2021, inspired by a cousin who died of a rare genetic illness. Backed by investors and prominent tech entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel and Alexis Ohanian, Sadeghi says his company has already helped thousands of families.
Sadeghi says, "Parents have a right to know."
"We give you the full range of insights there is to know about your future child. We really think it's the parents' right to know," he told "CBS Mornings" in an interview that aired Wednesday.
Genetic testing companies like Nucleus say DNA screening of embryos can prevent disease, while also giving parents a unique ability to compare and choose traits that make up a healthier baby – and one that's more desirable in the eyes of mom and dad.
He continues: "They want us to, you know, play sports, and they want us to go to the best school. They want us to be well educated. They want us to thrive. Life, I think, as a parent doesn't just stop at 'I want my child to be healthy,'" Sadeghi said.
For $30,000, Nucleus offers a program called IVF+, which includes full DNA scans of both parents and up to 20 embryos conceived through in vitro fertilization. The results come back in the form of a sleek, user-friendly menu.
Advanced DNA screenings.
The company screens embryo samples for more than 2,000 traits and conditions, including eye color, hair color, intelligence – even acne. It also can estimate genetic predisposition to medical conditions such as depression, autism, and bipolar disorder.
Sadeghi says this "genetic optimization" allows parents to minimize disease while maximizing traits they prefer. However, critics have drawn comparisons to a different term: "eugenics."
"[It's not eugenics] by any stretch, because it's fundamentally about empowering people with information that they can use to give their child the best start in life," he said. "And yes, if you want 2 inches taller for your child, 3 inches taller, right, if you want a couple IQ-point difference, absolutely, by all means, do that. But I'm saying, you're really asking me here, you're asking me, what is life about? That's what you're really getting at when you talk about height and IQ, right, they're abstractions of life."
But while companies like Nucleus continue to grow, some medical experts point to the ethical dilemmas surrounding these types of new reproductive technologies. An article published in the MIT Technology Review in October argued that the race to create the "perfect baby" is actually creating an "ethical mess."
Some thoughts regarding the "ethical mess."
Back in 2018, Dr. Ryan T. Anderson, with the Heritage Foundation, wrote an article introducing Christians and conservatives to the scientific breakthrough that has led to Sadeghi's new industry of manufacturing the child you always wanted.
Anderson's response is even more applicable today than it was seven years ago.
He began:
Two remarkable things took place last month in the world of biotechnology: A Chinese doctor claimed to have created two genetically modified human embryos who were successfully nurtured to birth, and the worldwide scientific community roundly rejected this experiment as a violation of ethics.
In turn, the Chinese government condemned the doctor and called for an immediate investigation.
At issue was a developing biotechnology known as CRISPR-Cas9 that allows scientists to genetically edit cells. The technique holds potential to treat a variety of genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease, as well as even more complex conditions such as cancers and heart disease. Indeed, the doctor says he genetically modified the two children in question (back in their embryonic stage) to make them resistant to HIV.
As scientific experimentation has continued, some of the moral and ethical resistance has waned as people like Sadeghi have begun to monetize the science.
While "science" has moved past where it was when Ryan wrote the article, his thoughts are spot on regarding the Christian biblical view of "designer babies."
This research poses an immediate threat to the right to life of the unborn.
Regardless of where you stand on the abortion debate in terms of unplanned pregnancies, the intentional creation—and destruction—of human beings should worry all of us. Such callous disregard for human dignity does not bode well for the future of scientific integrity.
We should also care about the dignity of life in its very origins. There is a great danger in creating children in the laboratory, a process that treats human subjects as if objects of technological mastery. That will have profound moral and cultural implications as the science progresses: Societies can come to view human life—all life, modified or not—as something that can easily be toyed with and discarded.
We forget the fact that children should be begotten, not made, at our peril. And we should be wary of practices that separate the life-giving act from the love-making act. Indeed, these new technologies are misnamed. They don’t “assist”—they replace fertility and procreation with reproduction in a sterile lab.
Human beings are to be welcomed as gifts, not manufactured as products.
The technologies behind the manufacture of babies raise new questions, too. The CRISPR-Cas9 procedure, and others like it, allow scientists to take further steps toward creating designer babies. This would allow parents—or other authorities—to dictate the characteristics of future people.
He was right. And we are now "down the road."
There’s also the specter of a kind of “brave new world” genetic arms race, Ryan says.
Imagine John Edwards’s “Two Americas,” but between the genetic haves and the genetic have-nots. An America where the wealthy (and morally unscrupulous) design super-babies, while everyone else remains “unenhanced.”
Seven years after Ryan wrote these warnings, we're there. It's happening. And you can have your own designer model for your child. It's profiled and printed as a menu ready to begin the transformation for about $30,000.
As the philosopher Leon Kass has explained, “As bad as it might be to destroy a creature made in God’s image, it might be very much worse to be creating them after images of one’s own.”
While the children in 2018 were modified to prevent HIV, no one knows what the next genetic modification might be. And it isn’t hard to fathom how these new technologies could be deployed in the hands of racist, eugenicist, or genocidal governments of the future.
Takeaway
As the most recent developments demonstrate, China is especially aggressive in its willingness to ignore bioethical standards. Despite its face-saving condemnation of the CRISPR babies, Beijing is already suspected of using CRISPR and other technologies to explore the possibility of producing so-called “super soldiers” with increased muscle mass, expanded cardiovascular capacity, and even improved vision at night. This, in turn, is likely to tempt some in the West to lower their own bioethical standards in the name of national security. That would be a mistake.
Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.
"Our predictors can better predict longevity from an embryo's DNA than any other genetic model ever built," Sadeghi says.
He says, "DNA is not destiny, the messiness of life, the nurture element of life, right, how hard your child works, you know, what school they go to, what resources they have, serendipity, all those factors are never, ever going to go away."
However, he pushes back on the criticism that he's creating a new class of "superhumans."
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged, Be Prayerful.