A new startup claims that it can let couples screen embryos for IQ and other “naughty traits that everybody wants”, including sex, height, risk of obesity and risk of mental illness. Couples seeking IVF can pay $50,000 and weed out their prospective babies for the traits that they don’t want.
This reproductive eugenics is straight out of the film Gattaca. God help us.
The company is called Heliospect. It created an embryo screening tool based on data provided by UK Biobank, “a taxpayer-funded store of genetic material donated by half a million British volunteers, which aims to only share data for projects that are ‘in the public interest.'”
The Guardian calls this an “ethical minefield.” I’ll say! Did U.K. volunteers know that their genetic material would be used like this??
