Profs & Pints Alameda: Eugenics and Reproductive Biotech

Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “Eugenics and Reproductive Biotech,” on the false promises and real perils of efforts to genetically predetermine children’s intelligence, with Emily Klancher Merchant, associate professor of science and technology studies at the University of California Davis, historian of the quantitative human sciences, and author of Building the Population Bomb and co-editor of DNA, Race, and Reproduction.

[Tickets available only online, at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/alameda-eugenics .]

In the fall of 2025, a splashy advertising campaign on the New York City subway informed riders that “IQ is 50 percent genetic” and invited them to “have your best baby” by visiting “pickyourbaby.com” The company behind the ads, Nucleus Genomics, was the first to openly market polygenic embryo screening for intelligence, a practice characterized by proponents and critics alike as “self-chosen, self-directed eugenics.”

Today several companies offer polygenic embryo screening, and they have been joined by other companies in researching technologies that remain beyond the horizon such as in vitro gametogenesis (creating sperm and egg cells from somatic cells), the DNA editing of embryos, and artificial wombs. Together, these technologies promise a fully integrated “Gattaca Stack”—named for the 1997 eugenic sci fi film—that, in theory, could produce super-intelligent humans at scale.

Learn how we got to this place, as well as where all of this seems headed, with Dr. Emily Klancher Merchant, a historian of science, technology, and medicine who has extensively researched the field of sociogenomics.

She’ll discuss the history, science, and ideology behind these technologies, from the eugenics of the early twentieth century to today’s reproductive biotechnology.

We’ll explore how the heritability concept at the center of Nucleus’s ads—claims that x trait is y percent genetic—emerged in animal breeding and was borrowed by eugenics and mobilized in the backlash against the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement. It provided intellectual legitimacy to twenty-first century efforts to identify so-called “intelligence genes,” even though geneticists have long pointed out that heritability is not a meaningful metric in humans.

We’ll consider how, so far, the search for genes that determine intelligence has proven unfruitful. Though many genes contribute to cognitive functioning, scientists have yet to find any that make a substantial difference. Even when all genes are taken together, scientists’ ability to predict the intelligence of individuals is weak in white people and nonexistent in people of color.

Yet proponents of a high-tech version of eugenics known as transhumanism—particularly popular among those in the Silicon Valley nexus of company founders and venture capitalists—have seized on this research. It serves as the basis for the technologies in the Gattaca Stack, or at least as the basis for startups promising these technologies.

At a time when eugenics has returned to the public view, this talk discusses why polygenic embryo screening for intelligence and other Gattaca Stack technologies are unlikely to work as advertised yet nonetheless represent dangerous ideological and political economic trends. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

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