The DNA Dreams of the New Eugenics

In the fourth essay of the Legacies of Eugenics series, Patricia Williams explores how “new-genics” projects encode social bias.

By Patricia WilliamsSeptember 18, 2024

• Science & Technology

• History

• Politics

This is the fourth installment in the Legacies of Eugenics series, which features essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring the history of eugenics and the ways it shapes our present. The series is organized by Osagie K. Obasogie in collaboration with the Los Angeles Review of Books, and supported by the Center for Genetics and Society, the Othering & Belonging Institute, and Berkeley Public Health.

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OUR CONTEMPORARY CLIMATE of uncritical, fizzily buoyant techno-optimism assigns a positive valence to any ghost of a “medical” purpose, even if such interventions are inflected by cultural norms rather than biological necessities. Sperm banks, for example, report a consumer preference for donors with traits that promise phenotypically “Aryan” or “Nordic” expression: blond, blue-eyed, white rather than Black. Plastic surgery is routinely deployed to impose cultural normativity on the noses, hips, lips, breasts, brows, and jawbones of otherwise healthy bodies. By the same token, it is rare to see seriously engaged public discussion about the downsides of the most invasive alterations, such as the genetic modification of heritable human cell lines. And while the recent bewildering legal and religious figuration of frozen embryos as “extra-uterine children” with full civil rights has thrown an unholy monkey wrench into the discussion of assisted reproductive technology, it is also true that IVF selection and reduction processes have long been troubled by overtly eugenic notions of human value.

The Hippocratic injunction to “do no harm” has somehow morphed into a project of endless “improvement,” of chasing “progress” in hamster-wheel fashion. Our inability, however, to attach negative connotations to eugenic tinkering with racial, ethnic, sexual, and other social forms of value is a failure of imagination. It is also a license for hubris, for not caring about unintended consequences, which are routinely ignored, especially by those with power over others.

In the context of the history of eugenics, one might locate the problem in individual decisions or public policies about social worth that are infused, however covertly, with any of the following characteristics:

• • eliminative thinking that treats the existence of particular human beings as economically burdensome or inefficient;
  • eliminative thinking driven by an irrational sense of revulsion, fear, impatience, or disgust;
  • accumulative thinking rooted in treating other people as objects of property, mere levers for personal profit;
  • zero-sum thinking mapped onto us-them figurations;
  • imagined hierarchies reinforced by mechanisms of social control, particularly related to fertility (i.e., notions of who may breed profusely and who should not);
  • fantasies of social control based on “perfecting” others, including future generations, often under the guise of utility;
  • resistance to self-questioning, lack of concern about unintended consequences, or indulgence in overweening self-confidence.

An efflorescence of eugenic thinking incorporating many, if not all, of the elements above is found among those who explore and develop new technologies that can alter the human germ line, recombine gene sequences, or add nonhuman traits to future generations. Relatively low-tech editing tools such as CRISPR promise to make such manipulation cheap and easy. Altering future generations through heritable genome editing may be legally prohibited in most countries, but there is in fact little oversight or regulation of such experimentation, and few windows into the motives of either the scientists or the corporations who have leapt onto the gene-editing bandwagon, with its promise of patented riches (and who mostly insist on “self-regulation”).

Despite considerable opposition, the splendid knowledge encoded in our genes and cells is being rapidly reconfigured, largely by heedless men. They are well trained in quantitative disciplines such as math, physics, and (sometimes) biology, but they are nevertheless the victims of a global educational system that genuflects before the mathematization of life, assigning scant importance to disciplines such as history, political science, sociology, psychology, or ethics. With hubristic confidence in the rightness of what they do, they dismiss any contradiction of their designs as suppression of free inquiry, and critics who question their practices and goals are labeled Luddites.

The 2012 documentary DNA Dreams: Bio-Science in China illustrates aspects of my concern. Made by Dutch director Bregtje van der Haak, the film examines the enormous global investment in processing genetic sequences, focusing in particular on work done at the Beijing Genomics Institute (now known as the BGI Group). [1] BGI is an enterprise that brags about its ability to sequence genetic material faster than almost any facility in the world. It claims to have harnessed powers that can speed up the human capacity to make mammals bigger and better, as well as smaller and smarter. That much is on graphic display throughout the film. But the parts I found most fascinating (and horrifying) were the casual conversations among the featured researchers—Dutch, Chinese, North American, and Danish scientists, and perhaps others of undisclosed nationalities. Their collective discourse objectified whatever they studied, turning living beings into owned property, inert objects bred to be financially exploited.

In one scene, a cheerful young technician guides the viewer through the gray metal stalls of a factory farm, where pigs are bred for experimentation, their cells altered with the ostensible goal of improving human health. She points out that some of these animals are bred with a disposition for type 2 diabetes, some to glow green in UV light, some to become smaller over generations so they will be easier to handle during lab work. She observes a wayward piglet struggling with a handler and says:

They’re really like babies. […] I still remember the first time I saw the embryos under my microscope. And then, after four months, these embryos had become pigs. I thought: these pigs used to be the embryos under my microscope. And I made these embryos. I was so excited about that. […] It’s really like being a mom. This is life that I created. It was made by my hands.

The heady power of birthing and “parenting” new life forms emerges as a field of dreams for the five or six other researchers interviewed. They are part of something called the Cognitive Genomics Lab, an international coalition of mathematicians, physicists, and psychometricians whose mission is to find “the genes for high intelligence.” Using BGI’s high-powered supercomputers and a reported grant of 1.5 billion dollars (whose source remains unclear), they fish through trillions of data bits to search for patterns in the DNA of children who have scored above the norm on standardized IQ tests. In one scene of the film, a somber boy of about four plays the piano with expert precision but as mechanically as an automaton. An unidentified voiceover intones: “In Beijing there are about 80,000 students each year. But only 70 of them have an IQ between 130 and 150. If we can get a third of those, that would be great, but far less than we need.” “We gotta make it happen,” says the unidentified voice from off camera—the “it” being forcing people to give up their DNA for the lab’s experiments.

Against the backdrop of a Beijing apartment whose geeky clutter is reminiscent of The Big Bang Theory, the genial guys of the Cognitive Genomics Lab hang out on overstuffed sofas and sip hot beverages, bemoaning the fact that you can’t just force the smart kids to hand over their DNA—Chinese citizens are afraid of what the government will do with it. It’s “because they got Westernized,” says physicist Stephen Hsu, a member of the team who grew up in Ames, Iowa, the son of Chinese immigrants who were themselves scientists and academics. (Hsu is a controversial figure; along with the likes of Robert Plomin, Steven Pinker, Nicholas Wade, Charles Murray, and other “new-genecists,” he has been outspoken about his belief that one’s place on the bell curve of IQ numbers is genetically based and solidly predictive of good or bad social outcomes.) Yet it is hard to understand what “Westernized” means in this context, since the team ultimately used Westerners to round out its numbers. The group’s aim, according to the film, was to collect at least 2,000 samples, a goal that has long since been met. But given the aforementioned hesitancy among Chinese parents to participate, the team decided to internationalize its efforts: ultimately, at least 1,000 samples came from Project Talent, a long-term study of American children.

Who knows, perhaps they will find—or have already found—the magic “it” of human intelligence. But the question remains: how do they envision using that knowledge? Hsu is also the co-founder of Genomic Prediction, a start-up that offers genetic testing and ranking of IVF embryos based on polygenic disease risk. GP initially included “low IQ” (but not high) among these putative risks but dropped it after public outcry. In a 2019 interview, Hsu spoke frankly about testing for IQ level and other “cosmetic” traits—in the process illustrating how easy it is to shift traits into the “medical” category.

There are lots of ways that intelligence might be measured and many critiques of the messiness and cultural ambiguity of the very attempt. Whatever the problems involved in deciphering what such testing signifies, the danger of such new-genic thinking arises not just in the tests’ translation into effective norms and standards but also in the social uses to which they are put. This is particularly true when they are used as markers of exclusion. Some politicians have already suggested using IQ scores to admit or deny applicants for residency or citizenship. Some parents envision elaborately selective processes of embryo reduction to ensure desired sex, eye color, or height. Some insurance companies calculate coverage depending on predictions about mental as well as physical health propensities. Some police departments believe that DNA might reveal who is likely to end up in jail: should their genetic profile authorize “early intervention”? Some entrepreneurs have hinted at drugs or other products that might enhance cognition.

In DNA Dreams, Hsu wonders aloud: “If I give you some diagnostic tool that lets you end up with a kid who has a three times higher chance of being admitted to MIT, I think most people are going to be interested in that.” Perhaps. But the dark underside of that vanity project becomes clear during a scene featuring a rather melancholy dinner among the members of the Cognitive Genomics Lab. Hsu speaks hesitantly, almost sadly:

I think if you’re a cognitively gifted person, if you’re above average in ability, there are lots of frustrations in living in a society where the average is where it is today. And at least one could imagine that, if you, sort of, overnight shifted the mean of the population one direction, that somehow not just small quantitative changes but huge qualitative changes in the way we organize society could occur. All kinds of solutions that, you know, maybe are totally unworkable now, totally impractical now, could be possible in that hypothetical population. So […] I don’t think it would hurt us to be a little bit smarter. I think, in fact, it could help us in some very qualitative way that people often don’t understand.

The others nod and sigh. It’s an unintentionally revealing scene, a breath-catching moment that sheds light on these people’s collective emotional state of feeling misunderstood. Their hunt for “high” intelligence boils down to a lonely search for friends who closely resemble themselves—or the fictional Sheldon Cooper. They suddenly seem like lonely children, searching for the company of other nerds in a society that has marked and perhaps bullied them as outsiders.

But … they are not children. And the seeming lack of connection between their utopic desire for hypothetical company, on one hand, and the manipulative goals of their work, on the other, makes them dangerous. It inflects their sadness with an extropian fantasy of ultimate social control. Hsu’s very diction is troubling; he buries attributions of powerful agency in the indicatives and pronouns he uses: I, you, us—so proximate and inclusive, a tiny band of “we” who “organize society.” Hsu uses the self-empowering language of someone all-seeing; he positions himself in an implicit trustee relationship over the blindly disorganized hordes of “average people” who “often don’t understand.” This is the statement of someone who feels supremely endowed and is tired of indulging lesser beings, of wasting away among the deplorably humdrum. It’s a social problem all right, just not one attributable to heredity.

The glaring problem is that a population-wide project of “being a little bit smarter” is the vaguest of solipsistic wishes. It isn’t related to any genetically guaranteed outcome of intellectual superiority (or else the intensely curated breeding stock of the British royal family would have yielded an unbroken line of purest genius). Consider the “frustrations” of another member of the elite society of apparently “cognitively gifted” boy geniuses, Elon Musk, who is rumored to be siring as many children as he possibly can (12 thus far), apparently in the belief that multiple versions of himself will contribute to the betterment of society (or the imagined society with which he allegedly hopes to populate Mars). But however off-the-scale his progeny’s test scores might turn out to be (and with all due respect to them as separate beings rather than epidemiological specimens), that does not say anything significant about the world in which those children will grow up. “Is Musk a good father?” is a better question. Will he be a good interplanetary neighbor to other high intelligences, given his arrogant, hostile, rude, self-centered, and fractious personality. Indeed, Musk is estranged from his own father, who reportedly berated him relentlessly (including one instance after schoolmates had beaten him up and thrown him down a concrete staircase for insulting one’s dead father). And that’s a matter of upbringing, not genetics.

That said, the biggest problem is not with eugenic ideologies that use technology to create a future seeded with stable geniuses (some of whom may feel so removed from their global cohabitants that they are blithely willing to bypass democratic norms at the behest of unnamed billionaire donors), or even with the fact that earth might become a planetary petri dish of genetic “corrections.” The biggest issue is that the power of negative eugenics is gathering like a very dark storm—darker and more dangerous than at any time since the rise of Adolf Hitler.

It is well past time to say that this is what negative eugenics looks like. It looks like elected Republicans calling for an end to birthright citizenship in pursuit of an America, as former Iowa representative Steve King once put it, “so homogeneous that we look a lot the same.” It looks like far-right political commentator (and Mar-a-Lago dinner guest) Nick Fuentes stating that “atheists and devil worshippers, [and] perfidious Jews,” should be “absolutely annihilated when we take power.” It looks like the all-too-powerful host of that same Mar-a-Lago dinner promising to deploy the Justice Department and the FBI to retaliate against his political rivals and those whom he deems his enemies, swearing to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

One of the most efficient mechanisms for carrying eugenics forward is the conviction that its harms are securely locked away in the past. This proposition is so powerful that, even when present-day eugenic projects resurrect the worst aspects of that past with chilling exactitude, few seem to take the dangers seriously. It is as though we think we can “disappear” history by relabeling eugenics with comforting euphemisms like “new-genics.” But, as legal theorist Hawa Allen warns in her excellent 2022 book Insurrection: Rebellion, Civil Rights, and the Paradoxical State of Black Citizenship, “history […] is a temporal illusion,” because “all of history is happening right now.”

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Notes

[1] Some debates about this film have assigned significance to the fact that it features a Chinese operation, which in turn has fed political narratives about American technological competition with China, and about comparative economic supremacy, that often devolve into racist squabbles about who is on top and who is not. In citing this film, I do not wish to engage with the obvious jingoism of those disputes. Rather, I’m interested in the embrace of eugenic theory on display in the filmmaker’s framing of the issues.

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Featured image: Still from DNA Dreams: Bio-Science in China.