Companies like Nucleus Genomics promise genetic superiority and, in tandem, may bring classist rejection.
For several weeks at the end of 2025, New York City’s subway system was plastered with advertisements bearing the slogan ‘Have Your Best Baby’.
Designed to pull on the heartstrings of parents-to-be, the campaign made big claims about attributes that can be chosen before a baby is born: ‘IQ is 50% Genetic’, ‘Height is 80% Genetic’, ‘Have a healthier baby’.
Anyone curious enough to follow Nucleus Genomics’ link to pickyourbaby.com is met with a lengthy explanation of their selective IVF process.
The process works like this: a sample of DNA is taken from a couple’s IVF-produced embryos, which is then analysed by Nucleus to identify more than 2,000 genetic variants.
These range from the likelihood of your child-to-be’s diseases and disabilities – e.g. cancer, diabetes, autism – to physical attributes and supposedly IQ. From there, you can choose your favourite and bring them into the world.
You wouldn’t be alone if this set ethical alarms ringing through your head, with the NYC advertisement being subject to harsh criticism.
It would be easy to assume that people who can afford the £4,400 to £36,500 packages Nucleus offers aren’t going to pick the predicted short, stocky, autistic baby – they’ll go for the tallest, most athletic and least-disabled one.
Nucleus’ founder, Kian Sadeghi, argues that they offer individualistic, free choice; that your healthiest baby is “whatever that means to you”, he told CBS.
This is not, he says, eugenics, telling Sky News: “What is ‘best’ is using this advanced science to help reduce disease risk,” he said. “And if you’re interested, predict something like the height of your baby.” It is, he says, “a modern way to do preventive medicine,”.
Still, only those at the top can afford these ‘designer’ or ‘superior’ babies offered by Nucleus and a range of other firms that offer embryo-screening, like Orchid.
Whether intentionally or not, the company’s marketing can be read as appealing to wealthy Americans by promising children with the greatest possible advantages — and, with that, the sense of simply being ‘better’.
Ugliness is viewed as a lower-class phenomenon, which we’ve seen avoided in the plastic surgery and cosmetic trends of the upper classes; now it’s a choice not to have ugly or disabled children, which the lower classes cannot afford.
Nucleus does provide the latter of these services, and some argue this is akin to practising modern-day eugenics: “it involves people in positions of power making value judgements about which traits are desirable or not,” as the British Academy describe it, and arranging reproduction to suit.
However, another question that lingers after reading through Nucleus’ website is: Does this actually work?
In 2023, the American College of Medical Genetics concluded that genetic screening “remains unproven” for clinical benefit, though Nucleus and other similar companies say they aim to spearhead development in the field.
Marius Turda is a professor of 20th-Century European Biomedicine at Oxford Brookes University and an expert in the history of eugenics, having published multiple books on the topic.
He began by outlining how, ultimately, the functionality of Nucleus isn’t the point: “they’re playing with a desirability on behalf of the customer. If the donor is a tall person, there is a 50 per cent chance that the offspring will be a tall person, and so on.” Essentially, if you want to have a tall child, we’re asking for a tall donor.
The statistics Nucleus uses are in place to satisfy the demand of its customers. “With predicting IQ, it is more complicated than physical attributes. They will never say 100 per cent because it is too blatantly clear that it’s a lie, but they will play with 70 to 80. Customers are already convinced that the service will work for them. They don’t need to be convinced anymore.”
As long as Nucleus’ customers think there’s a chance that funnelling thousands into their newborn will give them a ‘better’ baby, they will. Sadeghi told Sky News that Nucleus takes “exceptional care” in recognising that “these things are probabilistic in nature”.
Either way, no matter how well it works for the structure of society, the headline is that Nucleus won’t make great waves; we are already living in a eugenics-centric society. “Eugenics is an integral aspect of our global scientific and political culture,” and it has been throughout history,” Marius explains.
The idea that the upper classes will continue their bloodlines’ ‘purity’ in years to come has been around since the beginning of time. “Those in power were always under the illusion that they could create a group of people like themselves who could be in power and continue to be in power. Marrying into that social class, marrying into that category of people, was always following a social selection based on a number of criteria such as the colour of the skin, religion, or level of education.”
If selective IVF doesn’t impact working-class people directly, what it does instead is fuel the idea that they are subservient. “At the end of the day, the idea of a specific group of people completely dominating society is not going to work by using selective IVF. They know it; we know it,” Marius told us.
“We live in an extremely unequal society, and any idea that comes from this line of thinking only adds to the ever-growing dissatisfaction and feeling that we’re never good enough. Because for these people, we are always different, or we are the Other. It’s a continuous process of discriminating against people.”
The fact that Nucleus’ ad campaign ran on the subway is no surprise, then. The feeling of inferiority that its backers want to push is rubbed in the faces of everyday people, most likely commuting to and from their minimum-wage jobs. It wasn’t targeted at their audience specifically; it aimed to make headlines, and it succeeded.
Nucleus is funded largely by the white elites of America, people like Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, an avid supporter of the current right-wing pronatalist movement of America. Other supporters include Elon Musk.
Pronatalism is an ideology obsessed with a shrinking population, and is fascinated with “optimising” future offspring to be as intelligent and long-lived as possible, Sky reports.
Their call for pro-natalism is desperate, as in Elon Musk’s case: “If fewer and fewer white people have enough children to ensure the future of the ‘white race’, there resides a very uncomfortable, defeatist, and scared feeling that one day the entire legacy of the ‘white race’ will collapse,” Marius explains.
There’s no such thing as the most intelligent man in the world or a woman endowed with only the best qualities, though these elites have convinced us that such can only apply to them.
“This is all kind of self-reflection and representation that actually he buys into, as many other politicians do, regrettably, as you know. The more people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and others are parading these ideas and putting money into endorsing these ‘breeding’ programs, the more eugenics flourishes.”
“We live in an extremely unequal society, and any idea that comes from this kind of line of thinking only adds to ever-growing dissatisfaction and feeling that we’re never good enough.”
Marius turda
For most people, the concept of eugenics is closely connected to Nazism and the Holocaust. With the masses of right-wing support that Nucleus is receiving now, it seems more important than ever that everyone understands eugenics is still a societal construct that can apply to anything.
“Surely the association with Nazi Germany is relevant and continues to be relevant in itself. However, for decades, the entire conversation and the public debate about eugenics stayed within the confines of Nazi Germany, and that was extremely problematic for a number of reasons,” Marius told us.
“Eugenics is a global phenomenon, embraced by the left, by the right, by Greens, by Conservatives, by Liberal Democrats, by Feminists, by Anarchists. It really kind of echoed through so many political programmes – its message is promethean, it can take any form.”
In this case, it’s being used to push a rhetoric created by one small, albeit powerful, class in society. “Eugenics allows all voices to find a repertoire. People write their own musical sheets; I write my own song, and you write your own song.”
After its role in the Holocaust, eugenics was, of course, shunned, but it discreetly flourished in other sectors of life and society. But by abandoning the use of the word, we did eugenicists “a great deal of service”, says Marius.
“We saw eugenics in the fields of education, public health, social assistance, and medicine more broadly. And of course, its connection with psychology and psychiatry.”
By saying ‘we’re not going to use the word eugenics’, eugenicists “managed to stay within their own apologetic discussion”; they could continue promoting eugenic ideas, uninterrupted, unabated, and undetected, until we are at the point we are now, where companies like Nucleus offer screening on hair and eye colour for prospective babies,” Marius explained.
“Many critics of these IVF programmes or family planning programmes and genetic screening programmes make, in my opinion, a mistake by exclusively attacking those by associating them only with Nazi Germany. They move the conversation into a corner from where we can’t make any substantial progress in the public debate.”
Since World War II, there have been remarkable achievements in the world of genetics that must be acknowledged, such as the genetic screenings commonly used in the early trimesters of pregnancy to determine a baby’s health.
“We can’t deny that it is important to understand as much as we can of genetic inheritance and how certain genetic diseases are being transmitted and whether we can find a way to understand them better,” Marius said.
“But ignorance always leads to rejection. So if we don’t understand the disease, we’re scared of it, and we don’t know how to address it. In a way, it allows you to prepare for it should you decide to keep, say, the pregnancy.”
The problem is that there’s a societal fear that if we, for example, “convince all women to abort a foetus with Down Syndrome, in two or three generations, we will be rid of Down syndrome in our society.
“Rather than say, well, is it fulfilling to have this person around in our family, and maybe we can understand what it means to live with a disability. Some people would prefer not to have it, and that’s understandable too,” Marius told us.
“A biological solution is never a good idea for a social one”
Marius turda
“There are certain benefits that can be, if properly explained, attached to genetic science. But always with the caveat that this is explained for the purpose of safeguarding and respecting the individual.”
If we have the money to back so much research into genetic science and the understanding of these issues, we should have the same backing for supporting people born with certain learning and developmental disabilities.
This raises one question we have to ask ourselves: Would any of us have wanted to be screened? If there were a chance that we could be born disabled, would we have wanted to have that risk reduced?
“You could be absolutely ‘100% healthy’, but if you had the most miserable childhood you can imagine, where are the benefits?. You are as strong as Hercules and as smart as Einstein, but you become so disillusioned with life from not having had any love from your parents. Ultimately, there are certain things that you cannot predict; there are certain things you can’t quantify with the help of science.”
The quality of our lives depends just as much on upbringing and external factors as it does on our chance of being born ‘healthily’. As Marius puts it, “a biological solution is never a good idea for a social problem.”
It’s the same with Nucleus and selective IVF babies. With the chance-y nature of Nucleus’ programme, there’s a major risk that babies will not be born as ‘intended’.
“Fifty years down the line, a Nucleus couple could return and say, ‘well, that was an absolute lie. My child turned out to be a complete imposter in all possible levels of clinical care. I wanted him to be a great mathematician, and he turned out to be a fantastic painter’.”
The whole idea of designer babies supports conditional love – your baby must be and do as you wish it to for it to deserve love, as opposed to loving your child unconditionally, no matter the circumstances.
There is a huge amount of funding behind startups like Nucleus, and one day in the not-so-distant future, we may be seeing higher success rates for genetic screening – but only unconditional love will truly produce beautiful, healthy, happy, smart children.
Featured image courtesy of 28NinetyFive / Nucleus Genomics.