Another Silicon Valley dream, another nightmare for humanity

🧬 The debate over genetic embryo modification isn’t new — it has been stirring up controversy and serious ethical concerns for decades, warranting a ban in several countries. But in Silicon Valley, where money talks, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — who has made a career out of raisingbnsfor empty promises — is taking this on as his latest venture. He and husband software engineer Oliver Mulherin, along with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, have invested in Preventive, a San Francisco startup focused on embryo modification, raising USD 30 mn in seed funding, according to the Wall Street Journal.

What we know: Founded this past May, the biotech startup allegedly wants to modify embryos before birth to prevent certain genetic diseases. The company is currently shopping around for a country that allows embryo modification so that they can start experimenting — and the UAE is reportedly on their shortlist. CEO Lucas Harrington noted that they are being forced to look outside the US due to the FDA refusing to review human trial applications that involve embryo modification.

From exclusive matchmaking services for high-IQ singles to companies like Herasight and Nucleus Genomics that promise to predict your future child’s intelligence and risk for conditions like ADHD and anxiety, it’s no secret that the Silicon Valley elite are obsessed with creating the “perfect” child to build a legacy of intelligence. This comes from the belief that producing smarter generations will protect humanity from future threats, turning embryos into consumer products with a tagline of USD 50k each.

We’ve seen this before — in 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the world by announcing that three babies had been born from genetically modified embryos, with their genes edited to make them immune to HIV. He was promptly jailed by Chinese authorities for three years and hit with a hefty fine for crossing ethical lines and violating the government’s ban on human embryo experiments.

Genetic screening already exists: Many medical companies already offer genetic screening for embryos during IVF procedures, spotting certain diseases to help parents decide whether to use, freeze, or discard embryos. But since current screening only catches specific conditions like cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs disease, some tech companies are pushing polygenic screening, a method of extracting DNA from embryos and running it through statistical algorithms to predict a much wider range of traits and potential health issues.

Polygenic screening isn’t medically or clinically useful, a report from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics was cited in an investigation last year. It hasn’t been proven whether embryos that flagged any of the markers will actually carry the indicated diseases once they develop, so making IVF decisions based on mere probabilities isn’t much different from fortunetelling.

The nature or nurture debate has entered the chat. Treating genetics as the end-all-be-all ignores the importance of the child’s environment on their development. Gene-environment interactions show that most human traits and diseases are influenced by complex environmental factors such as chemicals in the air or water, nutrition, ultraviolet radiation, and social context. Genetically identical organisms often vary greatly in phenotype, clearly showing that development is dynamic.

Another legitimate argument foresees access to exclusive medical service being limited to a small group of wealthy people, and the treatment of children as customizable products that can be designed to order, completely disregarding human dignity, which is a natural human right, not one that one group should grant to another.

“Either lying, delusional, or both.” Fyodor Urnov, director at UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute, told WSJ that Preventive’s leaders would not be “working on genetic diseases” if they were genuinely interested in treating disease — even experts do not understand everything about how genes interact with each other, and warn that “an embryo’s genes could be passed down to future generations, including unintended mistakes.”

Preventive’s philanthropic guise is achieving a revolutionary biological breakthrough that eliminates chronic disease, but that spells a bigger problem for humanity. If an entity can delete a genetic component responsible for a specific disease, how can we guarantee that they won’t add or modify genes in a harmful way, whether purposefully or not? The technology being banned in many countries means that there is no regulatory authority that can prevent its misuse or exploitation, whether by the company, others, or health ins. conglomerates. Preventive is currently a non-profit organization, but with Sam Altman now on board, we can see another OpenAI switch in the works.

A bleak future on the horizon? Just as major companies have benefited from Palestinian genocide through arms dealing or manufacturing, this technology — if it becomes reality — could become a tool that defines (or disfigures) entire generations. Preventive’s experiments remain on hold pending either regulatory approval or finding a host country for trials, concerns persist about how far human ambition driven by grand slogans could go in pursuit in the name of innovation and endless income.