A New Eugenics Gold Rush? From designer babies to not-quite-designer jeans
If you’ve been online or caught the news in the past few weeks, you’ve probably come across Sydney Sweeney, her “great genes jeans,” and much debate over whether they reflect a resurgence of eugenics in American politics and culture.
In case you missed it, here’s what happened. At the end of July, US-based clothing company American Eagle released a new ad campaign. In one ad, Sweeney breathily recites the following, while lying back to zip up her jeans:
Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.
The tagline on the screen, emphasized by a voiceover, reads, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.”
In another ad, the actress approaches a billboard that reads “Sydney Sweeney has great genes” and replaces the word “genes” with “jeans.”
Numerous critics have dissected the ads, detailing how they evoke eugenics, sexism, and white supremacy.
It’s not just ‘good genes.’ It’s a dark reminder of history.
Sydney Sweeney's 'Great Jeans' Illuminate the Dangerous Resurgence of Eugenics
Diagnosing Bias: Eugenics and the American Eagle Jeans Campaign
In The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel notes that Sydney Sweeney’s image had already been “co-opted by the right, accurately or not” and this, in the context of the current political moment, influences how the ad comes across:
“Those who have spoken out about the advertisement aren’t doing so in a vacuum: Fears over eugenics creeping into mainstream culture are empirically grounded.”
It’s quite an understatement. This is a moment when eugenic notions are more prevalent in US politics and culture than at any point since the heyday of the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century.
Sweeney’s purportedly “great genes” and American Eagle’s poor taste in puns may serve to boost the profiles of both the brand and the film star. As observers have pointed out, even blatant uses of eugenics to sell products are not new. But even as disturbing as these ads are, they are the least of our concerns compared to other recent episodes that normalize eugenics.
Trump’s latest eugenic claims
While Fox news hosts ranted about the “woke liberal outrage” sparked by American Eagle ads, President Trump – who has repeatedly touted his own “great genes” – reached back into the eugenic playbook for an even more blatant example.
According to reporting from Rolling Stone and MSNBC, Trump claimed on August 5 that immigrants are “naturally” suited to harsh farm labor, apparently seeing this as a legitimate, if limited, critique of his cruel campaign of anti-immigrant raids, detainments, and harassment.
“We can’t let our farmers not have anybody…These [are] people that you can’t replace them very easily — you know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work. They’re just not doing that work. And they’ve tried — we’ve tried, everybody tried. They don’t do it. These people do it naturally. Naturally. I said, ‘What happens’ — to a farmer the other day — ‘What happens if they get a bad back?’ He said, ‘They don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die.’ I said, ‘That’s interesting.’ ... In many ways, they’re very, very special people.
The “designer baby” market takes off
Alongside these revivals of “classic” eugenics, we’re seeing a rapid and alarming normalization of high-tech, market driven eugenics in the form of proliferating startups racing to commercialize designer babies. Several new companies are offering polygenic screening of IVF embryos; others are claiming they’ll develop heritable genome editing and artificial gametes for reproduction.
The embryo screening sector has recently taken off. In addition to Genomic Prediction, which launched the practice years ago, companies including Orchid, Nucleus Genomics, and Heliospect say they’ll genetically analyze a batch of IVF embryos, using proprietary algorithms, to determine each one’s risk of developing a long list of diseases and other conditions. The cost ranges from $2500 to $50,000 per embryo. Most of the embryo screening startups are coy about whether this includes non-medical traits.
The latest entry in the field, Herasight, explicitly offers IQ predictions, catering to what The Wall Street Journal calls a “growing obsession with having smarter babies” in Silicon Valley.
Manhattan Genomics – a new startup positioning itself as a “Manhattan Project” for heritable human genome editing – launched on August 5. The company was co-founded by Cathy Tie, a serial entrepreneur who recently gained notoriety for managing He Jiankui’s newly edgy social media persona (as well as being briefly married to him), and Eriona Hysolli, former geneticist for Colossal Biosciences, infamous for their vigorously publicized work to “de-extinct” woolly mammoths and other long-gone creatures.
Perhaps because it was one of several companies to recently announce their entry into a race to commercialize “CRISPR babies,” this new effort received relatively little media attention beyond pieces from NPR and the The Free Press (paywalled).
And according to Endpoints News, new startup Ovelle is aiming to produce artificial human eggs for use in reproduction “in the next two years.” They are one of a few companies pursuing in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), or the process of creating gametes from somatic cells, alongside Conception and George Church’s Gameto, which recently published a paper detailing their experiments.
While IVG startups frame their work as providing reproductive options for older women, LGBTQ families, and people with medical conditions, the ability to generate gametes in the lab could just as likely provide a platform for creating large numbers of embryos for screening and gene editing. In other words, it’s seen by some proponents as a key plank in offering the so-called “Gattaca stack” at scale.
In her July Biopolitical Times post surveying the previous round of “designer baby” startups, Marcy Darnovsky warned:
[W]e’ve entered a new and more alarming phase in the struggle to orient human biotechnologies toward the common good, and to prevent their use in the service of a resurgent eugenics based in market incentives, genetic essentialism, and technological recklessness. It’s time to step up the opposition.
From designer babies to designer(-ish) jeans, it seems we’re now on the verge of a eugenics gold rush, with all manner of companies in a hurry to cash in. If “better babies” (for those who can afford them) become a profit center, techno-eugenics – and assumptions about superiority based on genes – will take off. We need both a clear rejection of eugenic logics and strong regulation based in social justice values to prevent the use of risky and unethical techniques like heritable genome editing.
There’s still time to avoid a world of engineered humans built to the specifications of Silicon Valley techno-elitists and biotech entrepreneurs. But the door to a fair and inclusive biotech future is closing fast.