The founder of Nucleus, Kian Sadeghi, wrote that the “Have your best baby” ad campaign was intended to make people pause and wonder. Science, he wrote, has “sprinted ahead” of public awareness of technological possibility. “Have your best baby” is meant to shock and awe—and to suggest that what’s shocking today might be tomorrow’s ho-hum usual. [...]
The feeling that the Nucleus ads are aiming to evoke—"Wait, can I do that!? Are people doing that? Is this not taboo anymore? When did we start living in this future?”—reminded me of another time I was confronted by medical technology that has sprinted way ahead, faster than anyone but experts realized: When Kris Jenner revealed her new face. She even used similar language to the Nucleus ads. The now 70-year-old reality TV star and “momager” to her many famous Kardashian/Jenner offspring told Vogue Arabia that she had a new facelift because she wanted to be “the best version” of herself.
And the parallels between polygenic embryo selection and cosmetic surgery don’t stop there.
[...] You will never see Nucleus run an ad campaign that shows the gritty reality of IVF, which requires many daily needles, injecting hormones in one’s belly or thighs, followed by a doctor inserting a needle through one’s vagina. Side effects can range from mild (mood swings, bloating, fatigue) to severe conditions requiring hospitalization (ovaries leaking fluid, rapid weight gain, kidney failure).
Similarly, advertisements for “deep plane” facelifts, the procedure reportedly undergone by Kris Jenner, feature stunning “before and after” pictures showing patients looking remarkably younger. It’s a lot more difficult to find photographs of the procedure itself, because it involves, you know, taking someone’s face off. [...]
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An IVF-created embryo is not a baby, and polygenic risk scores are not a crystal ball showing the future physical health, or mental health, or intelligence, or personality of any embryo. What a prospective parent can “pick” is not a baby, but an embryo that has a particular combination of polygenic risk scores, [...]“Have the baby that results from the embryo that has a 12% lower risk of dropping out of college, but a 4% greater risk of a serious psychotic disorder, compared to the embryo selected at random” doesn’t make for very good ad copy, though.
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Embryo testing companies envision a future in which parents who conceive their children without medical intervention will feel about their child the way I sometimes feel about my aging body: regret at being saddled with an inferior product, self-blame at not having “fixed” it. A child’s differences, fragilities, flaws, and challenges will no longer be facts about a person, which you might grieve, accept, accommodate, ameliorate, treat, care for, or even celebrate. They will be choices, and the parent will be culpable for not choosing to avoid them.
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I want people to be able to have children, if they want them, and to have them on their own terms. I value bodily autonomy. At the same time, I want to live in a society where everyone is recognized as deserving of and entitled to care, regardless of whether they “optimized” their career, diet, skin care, facial tautness—or their child’s genome. I don’t live in that society, and I fear that the possibility of polygenic embryo selection, even if most people don’t avail themselves of it, will further undermine the sense of solidarity necessary to work towards it.
From the article:
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