The 21st century has seen startups rise from a relatively niche business approach to a multi-trillion-dollar phenomenon. Between 2021 and 2023, startups generated an estimated $7.6 trillion in global value. From 2019 to 2023 — a rocky period for the economy overall — the number of startups in the US still increased by 16 percent.

But with all that success comes a whole lotta risk. It's estimated that over two-thirds of startups fail to deliver a positive return to investors. Many fail before they deliver any returns whatsoever.

That failure rate encourages would-be entrepreneurs to throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks. Over the past few months, we've been graced with such inspiring ventures as a Rent-A-Thug app, a for-profit alarm clock, and even an AI-powered camera that analyzes turds.

Adding to the mix is a shiny new "genetics" startup that would make Charles Davenport blush: Herasight.

Herasight was unveiled by geneticists Tobias Wolfram and Alex Strudwick Young, who recently announced the company was coming out of "stealth mode," a period of secret development startups can use to protect intellectual property. In the announcement, Young billed the company as an "in-vitro fertilization (IVF) startup," claiming it could predict the likelihood of 17 various diseases developing in a given set of embryos.

In a post on X-formerly-Twitter, Young claimed that Herasight had already screened "hundreds of embryos." His announcement was accompanied by a screenshot of an interactive widget developed by the company — which included another striking measurement: an intelligence range for predicting a baby's IQ score.

To use the widget to predict IQ, users first pick "intelligence" from a list of traits and diseases including schizophrenia, melanoma, and gout. Then, users select the mother and father's racial ancestry, as well as the mean family IQ. From there, one simply inputs the "embryo count" — anywhere from 3 to 20 — and let the algorithm work its magic.

Though screening embryos for traits like IQ is technically legal in the US, the practice is forbidden in other countries such as the UK, and many scientists point to a lack of evidence that embryonic screening can actually predict traits like height or intelligence.

Still, when has some murky science ever slowed down a startup?

"Today we come out of stealth with a paper showing that our predictors for 17 diseases — validated within-family — beat the competition, with improved performance in non-Europeans," Young beamed on X.

For his part, Young's collaborator Wolfram was tight-lipped on the announcement, preferring instead to repost positive press.

"From a market perspective, having children is one of the few times that people think seriously about genetics, and this particular application is also a rare case where genetic results are directly actionable," buzzed one of the congratulatory posts.

The Herasight team likewise released a white paper in which they detail the ways their work differs from other eugenics projects, like the subscription-based IVF platform Nucleus Genomics, or Orchid, which has reportedly been used by billionaire Elon Musk to produce at least one of his children.

The paper reveals the Herasight team's attempts to repackage the highly contentious topic of selective human breeding. The authors are careful to pay lip service to "bioethical concerns" with their business model, like the fact that genetic screening has a very real chance of expanding real-world inequality.

"Despite these methodological concerns, comprehensive validations of state-of-the-art disease [screening] remain scarce... and none employ within-family validation strategies to distinguish direct genetic effects from population-level confounding," one section reads. "To address these gaps, we constructed seventeen disease [screenings]... and we rigorously assessed their predictive performance in both population-based and within-family contexts."

In other words: sure there might not be any scientific evidence that traits like intelligence can be fine-tuned like a piano, and the entire concept smacks of eugenics, but we're being really careful about it, unlike our competition.

While the authors cautiously acknowledge technical limitations of genetic screening and the research it encompasses, they fall short of engaging with the eugenicist foundation of their startup — a telling gap, and likely a revealing one for the future of human reproduction.

More on startups: Startup Investors Foaming at the Mouth To Carve Up Your Job With AI


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