Can You Really Choose Your ‘Best Baby’? |
The written record of Arthur Zey’s decision to have a baby is extensive. For years, Arthur has measured and catalogued nearly everything about his life and posted it on his personal website, where he maintains an “Arthur wiki.” “I have about a million and one things I’m passionate about that I want to get out of my brain and onto proverbial paper,” he writes. The process of having children would be no exception.
Arthur is a recognizable sort of Silicon Valley–adjacent optimizer, though he’s funnier and more personable, wiser and more vulnerable, than most members of that species. Under the heading “Misunderstood” on his site, he has put together a chart: “Because I _____, people erroneously conclude that I ______.” Because I am direct, people erroneously conclude that I am an asshole. Because I like and pursue certainty, people erroneously conclude that I am uncomfortable with uncertainty. Because I am principled, people erroneously conclude that I am inflexible.
Arthur has worked in product development at Twitter, Amazon, Ookla, and Autodesk. He cops to being a “huge nerd through and through.” He’s Paleo, an Oura ring user, a bodybuilder, a Krav Maga enthusiast. His Goodreads profile, which includes nearly 700 books, shows him to be a generous reader, assigning five stars to much of his list: Outlive, Tim Ferriss, the collected works of Harriet Lerner, Atlas Shrugged. (One of his first jobs, starting in 2006, was as an IT coordinator at the Ayn Rand Institute in Orange County, near where he grew up.) He loves the “His Dark Materials” series by Philip Pullman. There are exceptions to his enthusiasms: Walden, that great work of tech skepticism and self-denial, gets two stars. The latest entries share a theme: The Happiest Baby on the Block, The Whole-Brain Child, Bringing Up Bébé.
Arthur has wanted to be a dad for as long as he can remember. In 2020, he left California for Colorado, where he met his partner, Chase Popp, an elementary-school teacher. (Arthur wiki: “Let me tell you, my parents were not okay with my being gay.”) By the start of 2023, the couple was ready to find an egg donor.
Arthur was blunt about how they would conduct their search. “Genetics matter, more than most people realize or are comfortable acknowledging,” he wrote on a new website devoted to his “parenting mission.” He had a particular interest in height and intelligence. When he struck up a conversation with an old acquaintance, an attorney prominent in the pro-natalism and seasteading movements, he could not ignore what he called her “exceptional manifested traits: intelligence, creativity, emotional warmth, physical health, and a strong track record of achievement.” She, in turn, kept dropping hints about what an excellent donor she would be.
Initially, he assumed they would have to let chance determine the outcome of their shared endeavor. Arthur wasn’t too concerned: He was tall and smart; she was tall and smart. But then she told him about Herasight, a company that had developed a novel technique for sequencing embryo genomes and using that data to predict the future of the child-to-be: its risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, and even depression, as well as its expected height and IQ. Herasight clients could then select the embryo with the genetic profile they liked best. This option was brand new: Earlier forms of embryo testing could detect serious chromosomal abnormalities or look for diseases linked to a single gene. For a list price of $50,000, Herasight could track traits linked to hundreds or thousands of genes.
Arthur wrestled with the decision presented by this technology. Reducing disease risk clearly seemed like a positive intervention, but what about Herasight’s other offerings? He worried about a possible trade-off between height and intelligence — what if he had to choose between a short, brilliant baby and a tall, slightly less brilliant one? He worried, too, about the burden of knowing too much: Could a genetic prediction of high IQ lead him to put undue pressure on his child? At the same time, he was certain that he would regret it if he decided not to test, especially if his baby were born with a preventable health condition. “I know I would have wondered whether things could have been different if I had simply used the information available to me,” he wrote. Now that this choice was available, no baby could be born innocent of its implications.
One friend was aghast at what the Herasight test promised. What about inequality, or physical and neurological diversity, or the ugly history of singling out undesirable genetic traits? Arthur organized his thoughts under a “Eugenics” tab on his new website. “Humans have always engaged in eugenics in the literal sense of selecting among natural variation,” he wrote. “What Herasight offers is simply a more scientific, transparent, and data-rich version of what we’ve been doing in coarse form since time immemorial.” A society with more healthy, confident, intelligent people in it would simply be a better world for everyone. As for the high cost, well, without early adopters, the price would never come down.
Herasight isn’t the only company selling this type of in-depth embryo testing, called polygenic screening. Arthur looked briefly at the competition, including Nucleus Genomics, Orchid Genomics, and Genomic Prediction, but he liked Herasight. The company was still in stealth mode and didn’t even have a website, but its reps spent hours on the phone with him talking about sequencing techniques and the statistical models it used to interpret genetic data. They gave him access to a demo that let him sort sample embryos by different traits; just for fun, he typed in 6’5” to filter out all but the tallest of his imagined children. Arthur and the egg donor gave Herasight detailed information about their family histories of disease and agreed to have their genomes sequenced: The company sent them each a collection device in the mail to draw blood from their deltoids.
On a parallel track, Arthur, Chase, and the donor were navigating the IVF process. They found a clinic they liked in San Diego; Arthur and Chase were matched with a surrogate in Indiana. Retrieval and fertilization went smoothly, though the eggs, then embryos, were subject to the same brutal math faced by families using IVF everywhere: 30 of the eggs drawn from the donor’s ovaries were mature enough to be used; 20 of those eggs were successfully fertilized; 12 of those developed into embryos; six were considered potentially viable. After biopsy, a delicate process involving removing a handful of cells from the embryo around the fifth day of its development, only three were found to be fully chromosomally normal. Herasight took the data from the biopsies, the family histories, and from sequencing Arthur and the donor’s genomes and returned a predicted genetic profile for each embryo. By early 2025, Arthur and Chase had picked their favorite.
Online, Arthur wrote about his desire to bring order to the chaos of life through data. “I’m definitely a ‘control freak,’” he wrote. ‘“Feelings of being out of control intensify fixations on what I can control.” For most of human history, becoming a parent has been a moment of maximal uncertainty, a radical transformation entirely subject to randomness. Herasight offered a way out of that bind. It’s no wonder Arthur Zey took it.
That a pro-natalist seasteading attorney would be spreading the word about Herasight is no coincidence. Many of the company’s first customers were Bay Area rationalists: IQ-obsessed quants who were already thinking about their “reproductive health stack” of fertility-enhancing supplements and peptides. “It’s hard not to love this technology,” writes Scott Alexander, the author of the rationalist blog Astral Codex Ten. He pointed to research, published by Herasight, suggesting that embryo selection guided by its predictions could lead to double-digit reductions in the relative risk of a child developing diseases such as diabetes or breast cancer: “If this were a single-use medical treatment, delivered by a doctor after someone got the relevant condition, it would be one of the biggest advances of the decade.” Peter Thiel, Alexis Ohanian, and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong have all invested in companies that provide polygenic embryo screening.
Now this innovation seems poised to breach Silicon Valley containment. In the fall, CBS ran two separate specials on polygenic screening, one on Herasight and one on Nucleus Genomics. (“I’m struggling to find the downside here,” Gayle King concluded.) And in November, Nucleus ran a high-profile series of ads in the New York subway system. “IQ IS 50%........