Is Your Embryo Harvard Material?

New York City is a living gallery of human extremes: business, entertainment, culture, night life — even parenting. As one observer notes: “At some of NYC’s most elite early childhood institutions, toddlers are being immersed in Mandarin, introduced to wellness through movement-based science, and taught emotional regulation techniques that wouldn’t be out of place in a corporate mindfulness seminar.”

You can therefore only imagine the dread some New York City parents must have felt when, upon entering the metro in the autumn of 2025, they were greeted by a full-height advertisement proclaiming that their little Liam or Olivia had already missed a big opportunity to get ahead, and there was no going back.

But many would-be parents must have been elated. Nucleus Genomics, a company offering genetic embryo screening, knew its audience. Its punchy campaign promised parents another leg up in the struggle for that coveted day care spot, with slogans like “Have your best baby,” “Have a smarter baby,” or, for those more interested in raising future Knicks, “Have a taller baby,” superimposed over portraits of smiling tots.

Nucleus is one of a wave of fertility startups making headline-grabbing promises about the insights they can glean from the genetic testing of embryos. A scientist at Herasight proclaimed last year that customers could boost their children’s IQ by up to 9 points. Marketing copy for Orchid Health asks you to contact them to “take the first step towards having healthy kids.”

The claims these companies make are largely underwritten by recent advances in genetic testing undertaken as part of the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process, where embryos are being selected in the lab for implantation into the womb on the basis of certain parental preferences. For many years, scientists have been identifying single-gene, or “monogenic,” mutations that correspond to some kinds of disorders, like Huntington’s disease. But this new wave of startups is emphasizing so-called “polygenic” embryo screening, where complex genetic markers are identified that may predispose the bearer toward common conditions like heart disease or some cancers — and that may also help predict traits like height and eye color, and possibly personality and intelligence. There are serious scientific questions about whether all these traits can really be predicted on the basis of genetics at all, but as the science advances it is plausible that the fog will eventually lift.

But while these companies eagerly proclaim their capabilities, there is another problem they are trying to solve: the public worry about whether their services are really ethical. When Herasight announced what it called “the world’s most powerful genetic predictor of cognitive ability” last fall, it also published a lengthy ethical defense of embryo screening. Nucleus Genomics is flooding the zone with its public relations campaign, knowingly generating moral outrage in order to expand the realm of the ethically defensible. And Orchid’s founder, Noor Siddiqui, has spoken at length about the genetically induced blindness her mother experienced in adulthood and how that inspired Siddiqui’s work. The ethical concerns are manifold, from eugenics and the moral status of the embryo to the problems with predictions that are inherently probabilistic.

But consider also the more personal worry in the minds of future parents: Am I doing everything I should for the children I hope to have? With the availability of embryo-screening services, responsible parenting now includes decisions that humans have never had to make. We may imagine that only a narrow sliver of neurotic technocrats will actually change their reproductive habits while everyone else gets it on as they always have. But these companies do not have such a narrow target market in mind: they aim to redefine responsible parenting for all of us.

Among the boldest of the genetic-screening companies is Herasight, whose in-house philosopher, Jonathan Anomaly, has written extensively on the ethics of genetic enhancement. Anomaly is also a co-founder of the company.

Even before Herasight, in the 2018 article “Defending Eugenics,” Anomaly argued that parents are morally obligated to use reproductive technology to improve the quality of their children. “It is time to face up to the awesome responsibilities that accompany our reproductive choices,” he wrote. But unlike the old eugenics of state coercion, from forced sterilization in the United States to the worst depredations of the Third Reich, the new eugenics, he argues, prizes individual autonomy to improve the next generation:

Coercive eugenics uses force to achieve these ends, while non-coercive eugenics uses education, information, and social norms to achieve them. The distinctions are not sharp, and they do not map onto what is right or wrong in any obvious way.

These so-called non-coercive means are what Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein call “nudges,” which are ways of restructuring the landscape of choice around important decisions to guide irrational humans into making rational decisions.

A different kind of New York City public transit advertising campaign from 2013 exemplifies this approach, encouraging teen girls to think twice before becoming (or staying) pregnant by addressing them in the voice of their future children: “Honestly Mom … chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me?” The technique here is to present a decision in such a way that the right choice appears obvious — it is social pressure but in the language of individual freedom.

Social pressure is, in theory, Herasight’s approach for expanding the concept of responsible parenthood to include decisions about the fitness of embryos. This seems to be a way of getting around worries about outright coercion. But actually, anyone looking for Anomaly’s moral argument that coercion is inherently wrong will come away empty-handed. Consider:

Some authors have suggested paying some people not to reproduce, or instituting a parental licensing scheme. Francis Crick tentatively proposed both ideas at a symposium on eugenics. In principle, there are reasons to support policies like these. But they raise real worries about corruption by bureaucrats, black markets for pregnancy, and political legitimacy: in constitutional democracies, controversial policies cannot produce their desired effects over the long run unless there is some degree of transparency and public support.

So the problem with state-led eugenics is just that it’s politically and practically complicated.

Or consider the 2025 article “The Ethics of Embryo Selection,” a defense by Anomaly and colleagues of applying social pressure on parents to have healthier and more intelligent children. When discussing the possibility that governments might, in the future, require polygenic embryo screening as a condition of continued insurance coverage for anyone using IVF, the authors respond, “we think this hypothetical scenario is extremely unlikely to materialize, especially in the next few decades.” It is unlikely — unless Herasight’s attempt to radically shift current ethical and cultural standards for responsible conception succeeds. This statement too is revealing for what it leaves out: an actual argument against such coercion.

For an illustration of how Herasight is at work to change the terms of what society finds ethically acceptable, consider its discussion of stigma against the disabled. Anomaly and his co-authors initially do not seem concerned about the effect their technology would have: “In our own society, parents using IVF have been selecting against monogenic diseases like Tay Sachs and Huntington for decades, and there seems to be no rise in intolerance or stigma toward those born with such conditions.”

But a few beats later, the authors write that parents who carry the gene “might be considered blameworthy for not revealing this to their partner, or disregarding these risks when deciding to have children. In this case, the parents, not the child, might be stigmatized. And this is appropriate.” It requires incredible optimism to imagine a society that stigmatizes parents but cares tenderly for their children — especially because, as the authors note, respect for the disabled is anything but a cultural guarantee.

Earlier in the article, they called autonomy “the bedrock of modern medical ethics,” explaining that “parents tend to be in a better position than states or insurance companies to express their values through their reproductive choices.” But now they have let the mask slip: parents who don’t express Herasight’s values may justly face stigma.

In his 2020 book Creating Future People, Anomaly was more forthright about how recalcitrant parents will fare in a future suffused with readily available genetic technology — a future with not just polygenic screening but other tools, like in vitro gametogenesis, that will provide even more levers to control the outcomes of reproduction:

Others may continue to reject enhancement. After many years divergence would occur. If the costs of opting out of genetic enhancement are felt by those who opt in, and become very high, political separation is likely to result, and may be morally preferable to forcing others to enhance their children, or eliminating them. However, if the unenhanced pose a threat to the enhanced, perhaps because they have access to technologies created by the enhanced, but lack the foresight, patience, or moral constitution to interact on peaceful terms, they might be coerced to either enhance their children or be prevented from having children at all.

For a certain kind of prospective parent, the knowledge that there could be child-rearing optimizations left on the table will be agonizing. But the decisions themselves could be agonizing too. Imagine a genetic counselor presenting you with paralyzing sets of choices no expectant parent has ever faced: If you prefer high creativity for your child, are you willing to risk a higher chance of schizophrenia? And if you want to avoid schizophrenia, perhaps that might mean a duller child? Or: If you prefer high intelligence, are you willing to risk a higher chance of autism? These are hypothetical cases of what is called pleiotropy, where particular genetic variants contribute to multiple traits. Some researchers have indeed suggested a possible genetic link between schizophrenia and creativity, and between autism and intelligence. Such links may be relatively weak or uncommon in the genome, but some of them do exist and they may well become more apparent the more advanced the science gets.

Other parents may conclude that if being a responsible parent requires this many difficult choices, it would be better not to have children at all. If elite public opinion has spoken and the new norm for the upwardly mobile is to tip the genetic scales just a bit more for their children, perhaps it isn’t worth the hassle, the competition, and the risk. Prospective parents are already extraordinarily sensitive to the outlook for their future children in a chaotic and competitive world — not because the world actually is more uncertain, but from helplessness in the face of overwhelming risk signals. Genetic-screening companies add a new level of information overload, with the disturbing message that bringing a child into this world is a risk not just to them but to the world, owing to the child’s susceptibility to disease, personality disorder, or low intelligence.

Still others, who approach children not as a product to select but as a gift to receive, may find themselves caught in the crosshairs of an impatient public, disdainful of their willingness to risk so much for themselves and their neighbors by bringing forth children selected by that mystical union, not chosen from a catalog. Kathryn Paige Harden has compared the shifting expectations polygenic screening places on parents to those on female bodies brought on by cosmetic plastic surgery: wrinkles are no longer an unremarkable fact of aging but have become an obvious and conscious choice. The future contemplated by embryo screening companies is one where the ordinary exercise of one of the most basic yet meaningful impulses common to all humanity is a peculiar, antiquated, and even dangerously risky one.

As these technologies promise a litany of novel choices to their customers, their marketing would indict those who opt not to choose at all: as Noor Siddiqui of Orchid Health has put it, “Sex is for fun. Embryo screening is for babies.”

But we were all at one time quickened into this world by a hidden hand. Consider what that hand has brought: Siddiqui would never have lived to tell the story of her mother’s congenital blindness if her grandparents had chosen not to bear her mother. In an interview with CBS, Kian Sadeghi of Nucleus Genomics seemed unable to fathom that his parents’ unrealized preference for a taller child might have meant, if his own company had gotten a hold of him as a frozen embryo, that he would never have been born.

As far as the moral obligations of parents go, we at least owe our children their own dance with providence, or fate, or chance: to put to rest the unanswerable question of who would be plucked out of that dark and starry infinitude of possibility.