“N.Y. Preschool Starts DNA Testing For Admission.”

So read the headline for an NPR story about the elite Porsafillo Preschool Academy in New York City’s Upper West Side. The article recounted a new protocol for the school’s application process: a DNA test “looking for genetic markers that indicate future excellence — things like intelligence, confidence and other leadership traits.”   

Published on April 1, 2012, the story was part of NPR’s long-standing tradition of April Fool’s jokes. But sometimes satire becomes reality. 

In August 2025, The Wall Street Journal published a feature taking readers “Inside Silicon Valley’s Growing Obsession With Having Smarter Babies.” According to the article, parents-to-be — many from the elite echelons of the tech world — are paying companies “up to $50,000 for new genetic-testing services that include promises to screen embryos for IQ.” 

Used originally to better understand disease risk, polygenic embryo screenings are increasingly being mentioned in the same breath as IQ, with some claiming that polygenic scores can indicate whether a child will possess high intelligence.

“Polygenic embryo selection is being particularly taken up by tech elites and many of them are also pushing pronatalism,” said Emily Klancher Merchant, an associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. “These two are very closely related and, I think, in many ways, that kind of tech pronatalism is just a vehicle for eugenic activity.”

For Merchant, a science historian, these echoes of eugenics manifest in the “illusion that intelligence is primarily genetic,” as she wrote in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Merchant is currently working on a book about the subject tentatively titled Molecular Eugenics: The American Pursuit of Intelligence Genes. The book will explore the 100-year history of eugenics in the social sciences and its impact on modern sociogenomics, a field that’s explored, among many things, the genetic basis for educational attainment and income.

“People who are doing sociogenomics and who are writing about sociogenomics for popular audiences don’t seem to know this longer history of the eugenic origins of behavior genetics, which provides the intellectual foundation for sociogenomics,” Merchant said.

By revealing this history, Merchant hopes the book will deter racist violence and eugenic policies and business practices. While such historical reflection won’t erase painful inequalities of the past and present, it may help society reckon with the origins of certain scientific ideas and inform how we use them in the future.  

The false promise of intelligence screenings

Debates about polygenic embryo screening usually focus on ethics. Do parents have the right to meddle with their children’s brains? Will this technology create a biological divide between the rich and the poor? And should government play a role in its pursuit? 

A special report published in 2021 by The New England Journal of Medicine noted that the technology “requires urgent society-wide conversation.” The report reads that “historical eugenic policies that sought to eliminate people deemed ‘feeble-minded’ or otherwise socially ‘unfit’ make embryo selection for educational attainment, income, intelligence, and related traits deeply concerning.”

For Merchant the ethical questions, while of high importance, bypass a more fundamental one. Does the technology work?

“At this point, the evidence suggests that it does not,” she said. 

Polygenic embryo screenings are based on genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which “involve scanning markers across the genomes of many people to find genetic variations associated with a particular disease,” according to the National Human Genome Research Institute. But some claim that the tech can also be used to ascertain behavioral traits. 

According to Merchant, polygenic embryo screenings aren’t advanced enough to make authoritative predictions about how, or to what degree, genetics informs intelligence. What’s more, many of the studies aren’t comprehensive enough nor representative of society’s demographics. The findings, if applicable at all, only pertain to a small population, usually to those with European ancestries.

“Not enough people have been both genotyped and had their intelligence tested to sufficiently power such a GWAS, so researchers instead focused on educational attainment, for which data were much more plentiful,” Merchant said.

But as research studies accumulated, Merchant said the ability of genetics to predict how well people do in school wasn’t necessarily due to connections between DNA and intelligence itself. Instead, it came from associations between a person’s DNA, their childhood socioeconomic status and other environmental factors.

Even the studies that gain media attention with their claims of linking educational attainment to DNA are lacking, according to Merchant.

The most recent polygenic score for educational attainment accounts for about 15% of the variance in educational attainment among unrelated white Americans, but it accounts for much less (about 5%) of the variance in educational attainment among siblings (who share a family environment), and almost none of the variance among people of color. — Emily Merchant

The 2021 study in the New England Journal of Medicine described above found no statistically significant difference in expected educational attainment between embryos specifically selected for this trait and embryos from the same parents selected at random.

Merchant is thus less worried that polygenic embryo screening will lead to a genetic divide between those who use the new technology and those who do not, and more concerned that it will reshape social institutions around genetic determinism and fan the still-smoldering embers of eugenics.

What is eugenics?

The National Institutes of Health defines eugenics "as the use of selective breeding to improve the human race."  

Coined by British polymath Francis Galton in 1883, the word “eugenics” comes from the Greek word “eugenes,” which means “good in birth” or “good in stock.” Locked into the idea of genetic determinism, Galton “argued that abstract social traits, such as intelligence, were the result of heredity” with his writings reflecting “prejudiced notions about race, class, gender and the overwhelming power of heredity,” according to the National Human Genome Research Institute.

“Galton’s eugenic recommendations rested on the hypothesis that socioeconomic and racial inequality resulted from differences in inborn mental ability that were passed directly from parent to child and could not be overcome by education,” Merchant said. 

Such ideas were weaponized by the Nazis in their persecution and extermination of others that were deemed “less than,” but they were also adopted by some scientists stateside, albeit in ways that sometimes masked the racism underlying them.

A history of eugenics in the United States

One organization that adopted such ideas was The American Eugenics Society, which was established in 1926 and operated under that name until 1972.

“Beginning in the mid-1930s, the American Eugenics Society primarily started targeting class, but because class is so racialized in the United States, and because IQ tests are racially biased, they continued to target race without saying they were targeting race,” Merchant said. “At the same time, there was another organization called the Pioneer Fund that was established in 1937 by a wealthy industrialist Wickliffe Draper, who was a Nazi sympathizer, and his organization never abandoned overt racism.”  

Proponents of eugenics argued that the racialized class system of the U.S. wasn’t the result of inequalities perpetuated by those in power, but rather a product of nature. That thinking was not only deeply flawed ethically; it was also based on dubious science.

This didn’t stop Pioneer Fund-associated scientists from perpetuating eugenic views. William Shockley, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist with no training in genetics, gained notoriety for demanding that the National Academy of Sciences investigate genetics as the source of poverty, particularly among Black Americans.

“He called for a eugenics program that would pay people who agreed to sterilization, with higher payments going to those with lower IQs,” Merchant said. “By that point, a small number of psychologists working on the genetics of behavior began calling themselves behavior geneticists. Many of these scientists were members of the American Eugenics Society and hoped that their work would contribute to eugenic programs that would increase average intelligence in the U.S.” 

A book connecting embryo screenings and eugenics

With her forthcoming book, Merchant hopes to illuminate the eugenic basis of behavioral genetics and polygenic embryo screenings. She also aims to highlight just how nascent humanity’s understanding of genetics is.

“Scientists have found genomic variants that weakly correlate with education and intelligence in white Americans, but they still have no idea which, if any, correlations are causal and what their mechanism of action might be,” Merchant said.

The danger posed by polygenic embryo screening for intelligence is thus not that it will actually produce smarter humans, but that it will further the already widespread belief that socioeconomic and racial inequality are primarily genetic in origin, encouraging parents to make private investments in the DNA of their own children at the expense of public investments in improving the society we all share. — Emily Merchant

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