A risky biological revolution has already begun

I listened to a right-leaning podcast which interviewed a CEO of an in-vitro fertilization company. For those who don’t know the details, (oh god, I’m shy) IVF is a process where a woman takes hormones to spew out a bunch of eggs, which are collected, and then sperm is …collected… and used to fertilize the eggs (ok phew, we made it) in a petri dish. In Denmark 10% of pregnancies are … conceived… of by IVF. For people who can’t conceive in other ways it is genuinely a miraculous procedure. But it will come with more than a little ugliness.

One thing that you can do with IVF is take a little chunk of the developing embryo and subject it to genetic screening. Because it’s done in a dish, often more than 1 egg gets fertilized. So, you check all of them and see if any will have a genetic disorder, like down syndrome. It’s easy to see why this might be a valuable service for a worried parent.

The host of the podcast is mildly autistic, I think, and seemed excited. He said, “Wow! Well this is an expensive process, do you see any wealth differences in the people using IVF?” and the company man said “Yes actually, it’s mostly upper-class people using this service.” The conversation paused awkwardly, and it felt like they both realized the implications of this before moving past it, they did not address the implications.

The implications of this are that rich people will have babies with fewer diseases than poor people. Meanwhile, genetic studies are getting more advanced. Genetic studies now use the full genome of up to hundreds of thousands of people to investigate the causes of a certain trait. Given that the various embryos will have different combinations of the genes of the parents, you can pick the best one. It is an unfortunate reality that many desirable traits are highly heritable.

Imagine rich people can screen for intelligence, beauty, personality traits, immunity from genetic diseases, aging. With the advent of increasingly precise and flexible gene editing technologies they can modify the traits they desire. China got some negative press for passing through the barrier of making a genetically modified baby, but it doesn’t seem that they’re all that encumbered with the gravity of the situation.

Imagine a world where the top 10% have this power, and the rest of humanity is stuck to producing children the way they have for all of time.  

Uh oh!

The societal response to COVID made me realize that the group dynamics that lead us to the holocaust still exist in humanity. I realize that this might sound overly dramatic, but please, let me explain.

Until recently, an extremely aggressive campaign to brand the “unvaccinated” as a distinct class was undertaken by our government and most of the media in lock step. Through the actions of federal and local government, a group people was created who were illegal to hire, were not allowed to enter restaurants and bars, and blamed for spreading a disease. The slogan “pandemic of the unvaccinated” seems to intentionally conflate these people to a disease. Many people bought it, full stop. Accepting the caveats of polling, 1/3 of democrats favored confining the unvaccinated to their homes except for emergencies.

Now, I do not think that we were all that close to forcibly rounding up the unvaccinated, but the principle of creating an outgroup using disease as a mechanism is a time-tested road to hell.

I find this pretty troubling, to say in the least. It is largely poor and uneducated people who are not vaccinated.

A bit of a tangent: I had a Uber driver from Compton, who started chatting with me about COVID when I told him I was a biologist. I could tell he was a skeptic and I asked if he was vaccinated. He was not, he told me. He felt the government doesn’t care about him, and he doesn’t trust pharma. The vaccine was not FDA approved, he said, and he had some conditions that made him afraid of getting the vaccine. I told him he’s right, there’s been some bullshit, I’m a skeptic too, but this was really the one thing with evidence that would lower his risk. It might be a 1-2% risk of death if he gets COVID, but that’s likely one of the biggest risks he’s ever taken. He was a 65-year-old black man. It is a tremendous failure of public health that he felt that he should not get vaccinated.

It is now obvious the vaccine does not prevent someone from contracting and spreading COVID. If that guy got fired, it’s hard to imagine how he would make it, already living on the margins.

Back to IVF: imagine now there’s a class of people that has permanently altered their gene pool. They are subject to fewer diseases, less drug addiction, smarter, more beautiful. They also happen to be born into rich families and have a tremendous amount of influence. Is it hard to imagine that they’re going to view people without their blessings as diseased? It’s not an unnatural feeling, and I suspect that many people reading this feel it sometimes too. When you go into Walmart, don’t you feel a bit superior?

Eugenics is not ancient history, and not a Republican, low class ideology. California was a worldwide leader in the idea, and up until 1921 performed 80% of the forced sterilizations in the US. It was financed by the Rockefellers, and Carnegies, among others. It continued in California until 1979. They sterilized people deemed mentally “feeble.” Read the supreme court in 1927 on eugenics:

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Eugenics being a good idea was the consensus view of scientists at the time. Their “successful” movement was cited by the Nazis in WWII as an excuse to commit genocide. I am not convinced that humanity has learned its lesson.

The modern iteration of this movement has already begun. It’s been a silent revolution. Genetic screening is a routine service in IVF, and 10% of all kids in Denmark are now born with IVF. That’s a stunning number, a class of 20 students will have one made in a petri dish. The US has been slower to catch on, but with the age of first-time mothers increasing, more and more women will need IVF to conceive.

Innovations enabled by CRISPR and rapidly accelerating progress in biology, will put us once again in a precarious situation of being ruled by a class that feels themselves to be genetically superior to their subjects. Maybe it will be different this time.