For the past couple years, we’ve been hearing — on TV news, in magazines, and from new Silicon Valley–backed companies — that the era of “designer babies” is finally here, that parents can now select traits for their children and create, as one start-up puts it, their “best baby.” Companies like Herasight and Nucleus Genomics are offering polygenic screening of embryos — tests intended to show which embryos are likely to develop characteristics parents might want (such as intelligence and height) and which are likely to avoid illnesses and diseases, including depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, asthma, diabetes, cancers, multiple sclerosis, and many others. While the public debates the tech’s moral and ethical implications, anxious parents are already spending $50,000 on screenings, hoping, as Christopher Cox writes, to “rescue their children from fear and want by any means necessary.”
But can these companies actually do what they promise? In his new story, Christopher digs into the science and reveals something countless reports have missed: These tests are deeply unreliable, and as practical tools they have little value at all. “How many lawsuits are going to happen,” one clinician wonders, “because you’ve supposedly chosen an embryo that’s going to be tall, beautiful, and smart, and they’re short, squat, thick, and a little dull?”
—Katie Ryder, features editor, New York
